[HN Gopher] TSMC to build second Japan chip factory
___________________________________________________________________
TSMC to build second Japan chip factory
Author : ytch
Score : 497 points
Date : 2024-02-06 13:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| dralley wrote:
| How earthquake resistant is all the lithography equipment? The
| alignments are so sensitive..
| kibwen wrote:
| Like Japan, Taiwan is also on the Ring of Fire, and is no
| stranger to earthquakes.
| andybak wrote:
| Is "tectonically stable" a natural resource that relevant
| regions could use to their economic advantage?
| _kb wrote:
| Geo/political stability.
| itishappy wrote:
| Yes, and it's one of the reasons why companies choose
| Arizona for their fabs.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/why-do-chip-
| makers-k...
| ChatGTP wrote:
| We know how to make earthquake resistant buildings and
| foundations for decades now.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Fabs still stop when there is an earthquake and it is
| expensive. Being earthquake resistant means extremely
| expensive equipments don't break when there is an earthquake,
| it doesn't mean there is no interruption.
| razakel wrote:
| Not when you're talking about tolerances below nanometres.
| avs733 wrote:
| A lot of this is from memory so...possibly wrong...
|
| Very but also its solveable. You stop manufacturing, realign
| the tools, and then move on. With the 2011(?) japanese
| earthquake, there were impacts of the earthquake vibrations on
| lithography well beyond Japan - and it took a while for the
| earth to settle back down to the point that lithography was
| stable again. Aftershocks, tsunamis, reverberation of
| earthquake energy are all sources of vibration that can affect
| lithography.
|
| The bigger issue (to me with what you are saying) is actually
| within the semiconductor supply chain. At least when I was
| involved, many/most/a huge fraction of the basic wafers come
| from Japan. Two of the major players were (are?) SUMCO and
| Shin-etsu, and they had huge fleets of CZ furnaces because
| power was relatively cheap, and more importantly, generally
| very stable. The process time for ingot (the precursor to
| wafer) growth is on the order of like weeks/months and is very
| energy intensive. So, power stability is a big deal. The power
| issues after the earth quake had huge impacts on wafer
| availability over the following year or so.
| itishappy wrote:
| They won't break, but they may screw-up in-progress wafers and
| need to be realigned. You're right that they're incredibly
| sensitive, and they've built this into the design of the fab.
| They float the masks, objectives, and wafers on pneumatic
| isolators (separate stages for each, I believe). Extra-
| sensitive machines will also be individually isolated from the
| rest of the fab to prevent adjacent machines and footsteps from
| interfering.
|
| Here's an example of a common pneumatic isolator, the kind of
| which can be found in almost every lab making optics:
|
| https://www.newport.com/f/pneumatic-vibration-isolators-with...
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I think a while back TSMC finally understood that building a
| factory in the US is just not feasible, so their backup is to
| just transition to Japan long term if Taiwan's situation doesn't
| pan out. During the Pandemic for example, when Japan noticed that
| their supply chain is too dependent on China, and that during an
| emergency they too are subject to export controls, even for their
| own factories, they immediately acted to bring manufacturing of
| giants such as Iris Ohyama back to Japan. Contrast that to the US
| and Europe who keep talking about these things, but don't
| actually execute(although the US at least tries to throw money at
| the problem).
|
| TSMC lost the Chinese market, because their government went along
| headfirst with US trade war policy(similar to what Japan did in
| 1986, but worse in fact). South Korean officials on the other
| hand lobbied heavily to get long term exemptions, which allowed
| them to turn around their profit situation.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| The thing is, TSMC floundered in America because they had to
| compensate American workers.
|
| American workers aren't cheap.
|
| These brutal Asian work cultures can only exist in Asia.
|
| Americans and Europeans compete through ingenuity and intellect
| economically, not through a meat grinder of hard work. It's
| much different.
|
| America's plan to revitalize their industry cannot be
| contingent on the graces of foreign countries.
|
| China is grinding out their own domestic chip manufacturing
| even though it's far behind the technological sophistication of
| Taiwan. In the long run, China's strategy is vastly superior.
|
| It's a bit embarrassing.
| _kb wrote:
| By the stats, USA is the brutal one:
| https://data.oecd.org/chart/7kW3.
| 1000100_1000101 wrote:
| While that does have Japan, the link lacks China and many
| other countries. Check out this list from Wikipedia[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aver
| age_a...
| Yiin wrote:
| Could be a case where US workers work those hours
| officially, but Japan workers work a lot on unpaid overtime
| in addition to those hours.
| immawizard wrote:
| Per source: " The data are intended for comparisons of
| trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of
| the level of average annual hours of work for a given year,
| because of differences in their sources and method of
| calculation." https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
| newswasboring wrote:
| From my experience working at TSMC, although the number of
| work hours are higher it definitely is not brain dead the way
| you are sketching out to be. They are solving really hard
| problems with really short deadlines. I also don't see how a
| factory can work any other way. Every second the machine is
| down you lose millions, literally.
| trealira wrote:
| There have been former workers who claimed that there were
| unsafe working conditions there, and that they were called
| lazy by higher-ups:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/28/phoenix-
| mic...
| jacobsimon wrote:
| My understanding is that the US factory is underway and going
| to start producing chips next year and that they have plans to
| construct a second factory already. I've been seeing this
| negative narrative a lot around the US factory, but I'm curious
| if there's any evidence that they've actually stopped progress.
| I feel like that would be a huge political loss for Biden and
| the CHIPS act at this point.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| TSMC fab construction site in the US is a popular target for
| drone video and such videos are regularly uploaded to
| YouTube. I watch them, and there is no evidence of stopping.
|
| My understanding is that TSMC is happy with construction, and
| their main worry is CHIPS act. No CHIPS act fund is actually
| distributed to advanced fabs yet because US government has so
| many conditions.
| kredd wrote:
| It's going AFAIK, but had a bunch of mishaps and
| talent/labour shortage, so it's going slower. I'm curious how
| big its output is going to be, compared to the one that's
| supposed to start producing chips in 2024 in Japan.
|
| Just a bit disheartening timeline wise. It took Japanese ~3
| years (2021-2024) from the announcement to production, versus
| ~5+ (2020-2025 TBD) for North American factory. I hope we
| figure out the logistics and have it easier for the second
| factory though!
| KerrAvon wrote:
| There would be an easy fix: pressure Tim Cook to increase the
| US-manufactured content of iPhones. Trump actually did a
| version of this with some success; it was the version of the
| Mac Pro nobody wanted, because Trump has the reverse Midas
| touch, but previous presidents could have done more here.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Have the Intel plans concerning Germany changed?
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibi...
|
| "This is the first phase of Intel's plans to invest as much as
| 80 billion euros in the European Union over the next decade
| along the entire semiconductor value chain--from R&D to
| manufacturing and advanced packaging."
|
| Germany earmarked $22B for chipmakers support.
|
| Though experts think the EU needs $500B.
|
| https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/eu-chip-goal...
| gpapilion wrote:
| | TSMC lost the Chinese market, because their government went
| along headfirst with US trade war policy(similar to what Japan
| did in 1986, but worse in fact).
|
| Taiwan is definitely caught between a rock and a hard place.
| They watched what happened in Hong Kong and no longer is
| interested in rejoining Xi's China. So now they are threatened
| with invasion unless they rejoin China. They are reliant on the
| US to prevent that's from happening. So given the choices, it's
| not surprising that they are choosing the US to continue
| existing.
|
| It's crazy to me that you haven't see more divestments in China
| from Taiwanese companies.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| China and Taiwan use the same language so China is still very
| attractive for oversea expansion for Taiwanese companies.
| baq wrote:
| Ukraine and Russia also mostly speak the same language.
| Doesn't mean much if the great leader decides to make a
| move, actually it is another reason to make a move.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| About 1/3 of Ukrainians know Russian.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible
| languages.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Slav
| ic
|
| Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be
| mutually intelligible
|
| > Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the
| Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze,
| are not mutually intelligible with the standard language
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
| alisonatwork wrote:
| The Mandarin used in Taiwan and the Mandarin used in
| China are both standard Chinese and mutually
| intelligible.
| foobarian wrote:
| IIRC Cantonese and Mandarin are the two big language
| groups that are not mutually intelligible.
| gabagaul wrote:
| But Cantonese isn't spoken in Taiwan except a handful of
| Hong Kong immigrants. What's your point?
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| But they do speak Taiwanese in Taiwan which you wouldn't
| understand if you only spoke mandarin.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > they do speak Taiwanese
|
| Do you mean Hakka and/or Hokkien?
|
| Hokkien which is primarily spoken across the strait in
| Fujian.
|
| Hakka is primarily spoken in Guangdong, Fujian, and
| Jiangxi.
|
| Xi himself was the Party head of Fujian for most of his
| career and Xi's father was the Party head of Guangdong
| when he was rehabilitated in the Deng Xiaoping era.
|
| This is why most manufacturing in China ended up coastal
| Southern China - most Chinese Taiwanese trace their
| heritage to there barely 2-5 generations ago at most.
|
| The younger generation (post-1989) in Taiwan speaks and
| understands Mandarin.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| This whole thread has a bunch of answers which are
| confusing the topic.
|
| The issue is why would Taiwanese businesses care about
| the China market? Aside from the fact that the China
| market is massive, there is a simple answer: Taiwan and
| China have the same business language, and that is
| Standard Chinese aka Mandarin.
|
| Yes, lots of Taiwanese people also speak other Sinitic
| languages that are not Mandarin, and are not mutually
| intelligible with it. And lots of Chinese people also
| speak other Sinitic languages that are not Mandarin and
| are not mutually intelligible with it. And even some
| variants of Mandarin itself are not mutually
| intelligible. But - outside of Cantonese in HK and Macau
| - none of those languages are used as the primary
| business language anywhere in either China or Taiwan, so
| it's an interesting side note but doesn't change the
| point.
|
| All that said, aside from the Chinese market being
| massive, and the common language being convenient, there
| is a much bigger elephant in the room that explains why
| Taiwanese companies might not have a fun time doing
| business in China: politics.
|
| It doesn't matter how much money Taiwanese companies
| might want to make if the CCP can threaten to turn off
| the spigot any time they want to influence Taiwanese
| politics, which unfortunately nowadays appears to be all
| the time. Sure, it's leaving a lot of money on the table,
| but doing business with Japan or the US or other
| countries that aren't run as a single party dictatorship
| whose leadership has a stated platform of dismantling
| your own government might be a less risky option.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > none of those languages are used as the primary
| business language anywhere in either China or Taiwan
|
| Wo Tong Yi .
|
| I was just trying to dig into what OP meant by
| "Taiwanese" as a language.
|
| It's always going to be Mandarin for anything commercial.
|
| That said, you can't deny the benefit the Hakka and
| Hokkien diaspora provided to China's manufacturing
| capacity - it was diaspora Chinese from Thailand (CP
| Group was the first foreign private company to
| incorporate in China), Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia,
| and Taiwan had on PRC's catchup.
| 10hr wrote:
| you're correct. My taiwan colleagues visit HK, they
| request "no cantonese please"
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| Outside of Taipei, a lot of people speak Taiwanese.
| (While they also speak mandarin if you don't know
| Taiwanese you can only understand a bit of what people
| say)
| 0x38B wrote:
| Nearly every Ukrainian understands Russian, but many
| Russians would only understand the gist of what
| Ukrainians are saying, because the languages only share
| about 60% of their vocabulary.
|
| A lot of common, everyday words differ in Ukrainian and
| or arise from different roots (e.g Polish).
| beebeepka wrote:
| Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a conversation,
| no?
|
| Now I wonder if this number, provided it is a real one,
| went up or down during the last 30 years. I would bet on
| lower but it's only a gut feeling.
| vkou wrote:
| > Oh no, only 60%? Surely that's plenty for a
| conversation, no?
|
| It's plenty for _communication_ , not plenty for a
| _conversation_.
|
| (It's also a mirror for colonialism, by the way, where
| the occupied speak the language of the occupier, but the
| occupiers can't be arsed to learn the language of the
| occupied.)
| mabster wrote:
| It's not even necessarily enough for communication. With
| the Pareto curve on word commonality it's really quick to
| get high percentages of vocabulary. But it's the words
| you don't know on a sentence that are usually the
| important ones.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Ukrainian shares 84% of vocabulary with Belarusian, 70%
| with Polish, 66% with Slovak.
|
| English and German share 60% of vocabulary.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Except English, German, and Dutch are not mutually
| intelligible.
|
| Although as an English-speaking native who has studied
| German, Dutch often maddeningly looks like it should make
| sense, but it doesn't.
| dheera wrote:
| > Whereas different dialects of Mandarin may not be
| mutually intelligible
|
| Except for some slang words which nobody would use in
| business anyway, Sichuanese is largely intelligible to
| native Mandarin Chinese speakers if spoken slowly and
| repeated a couple times. People from Sichuan can also
| speak standard Mandarin. The written language is
| identical.
|
| As for Taiwan and China it is even less an issue. The
| very few words that are different may be the source for
| some humor sometimes but that's it. It's kind of like how
| British people say "lift" and Americans say "elevator".
| If you're not brain-dead you'll figure it out pretty
| quickly and maybe crack a joke or two about it. When you
| see a sign that says "lift" you don't panic and say that
| it's not intelligible, you can make some sense of the
| word.
|
| It's a non-issue in practical terms.
| iskander wrote:
| I was born in Kiev and spoke Russian at home. Can barely
| understand Ukrainian unless it's spoken slowly by a
| native Russian speaker. I can get the gist of what
| Zelensky is saying in an interview but can pretty much
| never understand native Ukrainian speakers. I think
| there's also a gradient of dialects and accents West to
| East, so I'm sure you can find some Ukrainian villager I
| would understand better but in general they're not
| mutually intelligible (to me).
| aswanson wrote:
| How close is mandarin to Cantonese?
| tmtvl wrote:
| About as close as English and Swedish.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| I have warm memories as a kid going with my Mom to the
| daily market, and watching people communicating by
| furiously writing words in their hands, in addition to
| the simplified tradespeak between the language groups.
| It's an interesting thing, having both a shared writing
| system and mutually unintelligible spoken language!
| numpad0 wrote:
| Maybe it should be more recognized that what the quote "a
| language is a dialect with an army" means is that borders
| of nations don't coincide with borders for languages, or
| put more simply, it has such two meanings that, there are
| languages that are realistically just weird accents on
| one another, and one "language" that are realistically
| two or more.
|
| I have some confidence with dialects of my primary
| language(not Chinese) within ~150mi of where I am; beyond
| that, mutual intelligibility with local dialects isn't
| guaranteed. Yet, those dialects are rarely
| considered(including by speakers) to be separate from the
| standard. They're just local accents. That aren't even
| intelligible to city dwellers.
| datameta wrote:
| To me, cantonese may as well be a separate language from
| Beijing Mandarin.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Around 1/3 are native speakers but the number of know
| Russian is significantly higher as it's the formal
| business language the way English is in a lot of the
| world. Hard to find exact numbers, but according to
| Wikipedia a 2008 gallop poll had 80% of Ukrainians claim
| to prefer Russian as the language of business.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Ahh TIL! Thanks.
| tastyminerals2 wrote:
| Well, this is pretty much dated. You would be surprised
| to learn how the tables started to turn starting from
| 2014 and finished turning today.
| theultdev wrote:
| Is this an anecdote of your experience or?
|
| 11 years does not seem like long enough time for a
| language to first start declining and then end as being
| the primary formal language.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| It's not "declining" but rather being actively replaced
| and rejected by the population. When your nation suffers
| brutal aggression perpetrated by the neighbor - it makes
| it no longer fashionable to speak the language of the
| aggressor. The fact that Russia also denies that Ukraine
| and Ukrainians are even a real nation and culture
| distinct from Russia fuels the sentiment too.
| vkou wrote:
| Organically, no, 11 years is not long enough.
|
| But you may recall that in 2014, a few political
| directives regarding culture and language use have been
| made by the Rada, and then a few political decisions were
| made in the Kremlin, and then everything turned to shit
| (To put it simply).
|
| It's easy to do a lot in 11 years when you start banning
| foreign-language media, stop using a language for
| government services, stop teaching it, etc, etc.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Still, that 80% hasn't died off so those people still
| know the language
| sergeykish wrote:
| February 2014 Moscow occupied Crimea. 12.04.2014 Moscow
| occupied Slovyansk.
|
| Name "few political directives" in 2014 before Moscow
| invasion. Ukraine actions are direct response to Moscow
| aggression. People don't want to be occupied by Moscow
| like Donetsk, Luhansk. Life is awful there, million fled
| from occupation. That's why changes were supported by
| majority of Ukrainians.
|
| Still occupants language was learned in schools, media
| could use it though eventually quotas set to use
| Ukrainian too. And officials continued using it.
|
| Ukraine policies fought discrimination of Ukrainian in
| Ukraine. Discrimination that stems from centuries of
| occupation by Moscow. In 2016 state stated at least 60%
| TV should be on Ukrainian. Only in 2017 education in
| schools was switched from occupants language to
| Ukrainian. Since 2019 Ukrainian should be used in
| services unless requested otherwise by customer. People
| switch to Ukrainian voluntarily, state provides means.
|
| Ukraine is a democratic state, check out Euromaidan. Stop
| pretending like changes is anything but result of Moscow
| agression.
| vkou wrote:
| There was a bit of a coup against one of the branches of
| government on Feb 2014, it's odd that it's missing from
| your timeline, given that it kind of precipitated
| everything else that followed.
|
| But perhaps that's how you think democracies work - when
| you don't like the government, you bring your friends to
| wear funny hats and storm the capitol, and get a new
| one... Should Americans do that the next time an
| unpopular politician ends up heading the executive? It
| certainly speeds up the transfer of power, even if it
| drops the 'peaceful' aspect of it...
| sergeykish wrote:
| Euromaidan was response to violent dispersal of
| protesters. Government escalated, eventually killed
| hundred of citizens. Do you claim Americans would do
| nothing if killed in hundreds? No persecution, approved
| by "unpopular politician", passed laws on dictatorship
| (16.01.2014).
|
| Moscow invaded Ukraine (Crimea) 20.02.2014. Yanukovych
| fled 21.02.2014. Occupation does not just "happen", it
| was staged. Ukrainians felt that as betrayal, seen as
| occupants population cheared in support. That hurts,
| breaks cultural ties. In a few months Moscow invaded east
| of Ukraine while spreading lies. Lies obvious for Ukraine
| citizens, believed by occupants population.
| vkou wrote:
| > Do you claim Americans would do nothing if killed in
| hundreds?
|
| They'd blame the people who died. At least, that's how
| Kent State went down (And the students there weren't even
| trying to overthrow the government).
|
| There's a process for peaceful transfer of power. Some
| countries have good processes for this, some have bad
| ones, some are in between. As far as I'm aware, though,
| no country has a process of 'Enough people storm the
| capitol' for determining when that happens.
|
| When you don't follow the permitted process, this
| compromises a democracy's legitimacy. Now, obviously the
| coup was only carried out against the executive, not the
| legislature, so the resulting government was partially
| legitimate - at least, the legislature remained
| representative of the public (And the issue was resolved
| in the subsequent election).
|
| But that aside, just because the coup only finished on
| the 21st, and the invasion happened on the 20th, doesn't
| mean that the weeks of the revolution leading up to it
| weren't intimately related to the start of the war.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Laws on dictatorship passed 16.01.2014, copied from
| Belarus, Russian Federation
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
| protest_laws_in_Ukraine
|
| Peaceful transfer of power is not possible in Belarus or
| Russian Federation. Ukrainians have no guns, democracy is
| not stable, judiciary and special forces are not
| independent, media influenced by state and oligarchs.
| Euromaidan saved Ukraine from Belarus fate.
|
| Moscow invasion staged not in preceding weeks but in
| years. Putin revealed intentions in 2007, occupied
| Georgia in 2008.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Something about having your country invaded and missiles
| fired at your cities tends to change perceptions of the
| culture initiating said aggression.
| edgyquant wrote:
| But they do not make you forget a language is the point.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I thought we were talking about the 80% who "preferred"
| it as a language of business. Surely that... has dropped
| like a stone.
|
| That and the way people respond to polls now is gonna
| change.
|
| In any case I think going forward you'll see English's
| fortunes rise in Ukraine, and probably Polish as well.
| theultdev wrote:
| The parent comment of this thread by @Waterluvian is
| whether they understand the Russian language.
| tastyminerals2 wrote:
| not anecdotal, I speak both languages. The trend now is
| to reject everything russian even though you do
| understand it, no way around this. And yes, the "kitchen
| language" for many ukrainians, especially east part,
| remained russian. However, on public or outside ppl try
| their best to speak Ukrainian. The younger generation
| will be more like the one in the baltic counties or
| Georgia. Understand russian but rather speak their native
| language.
| theultdev wrote:
| anecdotal means your personal experience.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I'm sure it is, but terrible relations doesn't make
| people forget a language and we're only speaking to the
| number who know the language. I've no doubt a generation
| from now that number will be a lot lower if things
| continue on this path.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| In reality it's certainly over 90% (probably closer to
| 99%)
| 0x457 wrote:
| The only Ukrainians I've that that didn't speak Russian
| are 2nd gen immigrants outside of Ukraine. Often
| hilarious because their parents often barely speak
| Ukrainian themselves.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Most of their construction material comes from China and
| most of Taiwanese exports go to China. Taiwan will never
| compete on the global market for most of its products. This
| current policy is economic suicide, and anyone not blinded
| by ideology knows it.
|
| Not a single US president pushed for a FTA with Taiwan. So
| far every single one has opposed it, while on the back
| bullying Taiwan to open their markets to dump cheap
| American pork into it, completely against the will of the
| Taiwanese people by the way.
|
| The current result is that Taiwanese wages have stagnated
| for decades and as a result save for a select few that go
| to Japan and the US, a lot of other people look for
| opportunities in Mainland China.
|
| What made Taiwan so successful in the past is what makes
| Dubai and Singapore so successful now. Open trade with
| everyone, and easy business opportunities. Both things that
| it no longer engages in.
|
| BTW the big joke nobody really seems to know is that the
| pro independence party has never submitted a bid for
| independence, while the pro China party has.
| Xunjin wrote:
| Why people keep believing that "open trade" solves
| everything and makes "easy business opportunities"?
|
| You can have open trade but also subsidy a portion of
| your economy to make that "open trade" not so open
| anymore. I'm not against it, just saying that a single
| specific decision makes Dubai and Singapore success is a
| reductionism that helps in nothing the discussion. Let
| take OPEC in matters, would you say they follow a "free
| trade" ideology?
| berserk1010 wrote:
| Many wrong things with comments. Your pro-china KMT bias
| is showing
|
| > Taiwan will never compete on the global market for most
| of its products.
|
| the aggregate brand value of Taiwan's 25 largest brands
| totaled US$13.84 billion in 2023, a 5 percent rise from
| 2022 and marking the fourth consecutive year of the value
| surpassing the US$10 billion mark.
| https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202312020012
|
| > The current result is that Taiwanese wages have
| stagnated for decades
|
| The average annual salary for full-time employees in
| Taiwan reached an eight-year high of NT$694,000
| (US$22,242) this year (2023).
| https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202311290017
|
| Taiwan to surpass Japan in GDP per capita this year
| (2023): JCER https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Taiwan-to-
| surpass-Japan-in-G...
| alephnerd wrote:
| > The average annual salary for full-time employees in
| Taiwan reached an eight-year high of NT$694,000
| (US$22,242) this year (2023).
|
| I am the complete opposite of a CCP shill, but that is by
| definition stagnation.
|
| The 2015-16 recession was brutal in Taiwan [0]. It
| basically was a lost decade.
|
| South Korea and Japan ate Taiwan's market in the upper
| bracket, and China ate Taiwan's market in the lower
| bracket.
|
| [0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/30/taiwan-gdp-falls-
| for-first-t...
| berserk1010 wrote:
| Not really seeing a "stagnation" using a graph, in the
| last 6 years
|
| https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/taiwan/annual-
| househol...
|
| 13k in 2017, 17k in 2022, 30% increase. and 22k in 2023,
| 30% increase.
|
| the stagnation from 2011 to 2017 is due to the pro-China
| president from 2008 to 2016, which fueled market and
| investment losses going to China. That reversed in 2016
| with the Pro-Taiwan president.
| hmm37 wrote:
| When you actually show the rate of change from e.g.
| 2014-2022, it's about 3.5%. Inflation being about let's
| say 2% over those years. Although the fact that it's
| reported in USD probably matters as well to really
| understand the economy. Anyways, the average salary in
| Taiwan across the entire workforce was just under
| NT$41,000 per month (median being surprisingly close to
| that figure), which is comparable to many cities in
| China. Also you can't compare 2008-2016, the US caused
| GFC caused a lot of issues. 2015-2022 household income
| also corresponds with how China was doing in terms of
| exports, since China was rapidly expanding exports around
| that time showing probably there's a pretty strong
| tie/correlation between the two regions.
|
| The fact that Taiwan GDP per capita is close to
| surpassing Japan's, shows how poorly Japan has been doing
| despite its stock market.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I tend not to trust CEIC - they have had issues
| converting data over time periods, which is critical for
| the NTW as it has been extremely volatile over the past
| decade.
|
| For now, let's use Monthly Household Income sourced from
| the Taiwanese DGBAS and in NTW [0]
|
| In 2016 it was NTW 84000 but by 2022 it was NTW 99000,
| which isn't a significant change, especially factoring
| the craziness the NTW has had since 2016.
|
| > stagnation from 2011 to 2017 is due to the pro-China
| president ... That reversed in 2016 with the Pro-Taiwan
| president
|
| It wasn't a DPP vs KMT issue. China had a stock market
| crash in 2015-16 [1], and Taiwanese companies were
| heavily exposed, as China is Taiwan's largest trading
| partner by a longshot. On top of that Taiwanese companies
| were already facing the brunt of the collapse of the
| CSSTA [2].
|
| [0] - https://tradingeconomics.com/taiwan/disposable-
| personal-inco...
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%932016_Chi
| nese_stoc...
|
| [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-
| Strait_Service_Trade_Agr...
| gpapilion wrote:
| Taiwanese companies run most of the major hightech
| manufacturing in China. For example, Foxconn is a taiwanese
| company. Most of my dealings with these types of
| manufactures has been in discussions of how to circumvent
| tariffs, not in really exiting manufacturing in the
| mainland.
|
| When I look at what occurring, I think it has more to do
| with their cheapest labor force is in China. So the scale
| and profit is hard to leave.
| aswanson wrote:
| The Chinese labor force has been reaching parity
| recently. Hence pushes into Vietnam & India for
| manufacturing.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Hence pushes into Vietnam & India for manufacturing.
|
| Doesn't help Taiwanese companies long term.
|
| They had an advantage in Mainland China being Chinese
| speaking. Already in India, Tata is becoming the Indian
| version of Foxconn for most manufacturers and VinGroup or
| Korean Chaebols like Lotte (SK has a FTA with Vietnam)
| the Vietnamese version of Foxconn in Vietnam.
|
| While South Korean and Japanese companies were actively
| de-risking in China by returning to ASEAN+India in the
| early-mid 2010s, Taiwanese companies only began doing
| this in the late 2010s after the 2015-16 recession.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The Republic of China (aka Taiwan) had never any interests in
| effectively and finally surrendering to the communists on the
| mainland.
|
| The "threat of invasion" has been the case since 1949. The
| communists stopped and did not 'finish the job' because it
| was hard, because of a deal with the Nationalists, because
| they got distracted in Korea, whatever other plausible
| reasons. This has been the situation since.
|
| Interestingly this does not mean that the people, especially
| pro-KMT, are necessarily 'pro-US'. Those people are rooting
| for China but not for the communists and see the US as a
| necessary 'evil', so to speak.
| throwaway2474 wrote:
| There is an enormous amount of skepticism towards the US
| TSMC deal in Taiwan, in the sense that Tsai Ing-wen "sold
| out" Taiwanese IP and top engineers due to political
| pressure.
|
| And in fairness, the US does not have a strong track record
| wrt its overseas military shenanigans actually helping
| locals, to put it lightly. A lot of people in Taiwan are
| anti-CCP, but at the same time, not pro-US because they see
| the US as an untrustworthy or at least unreliable military
| ally.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > And in fairness, the US does not have a strong track
| record wrt its overseas military shenanigans actually
| helping locals, to put it lightly.
|
| Furthermore the looming US presidential election is
| making people nervous even in countries that don't depend
| strongly on the US...
| bee_rider wrote:
| OTOH it seems fairly safe to build a TSMC factory in the
| US and loan us some engineers. I mean it isn't as if
| we're actually going to make the long term investments in
| the education of our people required to steal TSMC's
| secrets.
| jasonjei wrote:
| This is one of the most articulate explanations of KMT. You
| hit it on the nail that KMT isn't so much pro-Communists as
| it is pro China.
| alvarezbjm-hn wrote:
| But, How would you separate one from the other (China
| from government)?
|
| Sounds like a strawman for them
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The same way you can be pro-Korea and anti-communist or,
| in the past, pro-Germany and anti-communist...
|
| 'China' does not mean the People's Republic of China,
| which is the communist state that occupies mainland China
| (from KMT's point of view). Taiwan is China, too.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| The majority of Taiwanese people do not even consider
| themselves partially Chinese and none of the major
| political parties have any interest in political
| unification with China.
|
| Some people in Taiwan might wish the people of China well
| because they have family there, but this is no different
| to how members of the Chinese diaspora around the rest of
| the world feel about the country.
|
| The pro-China political parties in Taiwan are primarily
| right-wing parties, which is to say they are much more
| interested in the Chinese market than in Chinese
| politics.
| hmm37 wrote:
| There's an issue in how these polls are being conducted
| and it's hard to tell what's happening especially with
| Western articles that don't fully give all information or
| give the polling questions. The word "Chinese" have many
| different ways of stating it in Chinese. So when they ask
| in polls e.g. are you "Chinese", it really depends on
| which word they use. They can use Zhong Guo Ren , which
| does mean Chinese, but it also has a much stronger
| political connotation related to the mainland. So most
| people in Taiwan will say no they aren't Zhong Guo Ren ,
| since they have their own government. However if you were
| ask, e.g. are you Hua Ren also a word for "Chinese",
| etc, they will more likely say yes. After all the
| official country's name is Zhong Hua Min Guo . Mainland
| Chinese people will also say they are Hua Ren too.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Kind of like how russian has russkie (russkiye) which
| means ethnic Russians and rossiiane (rossiyane), which
| are Russian citizens.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Making the Hua Ren distinction is like asking white
| Americans if they consider themselves ethnically European
| or Irish or Italian or whatever. Just as people in the US
| with European heritage may have an interest in what is
| happening in the nation of their ancestors, people in
| Taiwan with Chinese heritage may have an interest in
| theirs. But in neither of these cases do the majority of
| people see the nation of their ancestors as the country
| that they call home.
|
| The context of these surveys in Taiwan is trying to
| determine if Taiwanese people see their own country as a
| different or perhaps more legitimate version of China,
| and the contemporary answer - unequivocally - is no. The
| only people pushing the myth that most Taiwanese people
| see themselves as citizens of China is the ruling party
| of China.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| That's a great way to put it. In the US we describe things
| as some "freedom vs communism" conflict. I kind of had that
| point of view until I went to school in Hong Kong, long
| ago. I found that in general the Chinese in HK had more
| sympathy or patriotism for China then Europe (particularly
| England!) or the US.
|
| They may not have wanted to be part of the Chinese mainland
| government as it was, but they were very supportive of a
| strong China. They felt very aggrieved about how Western
| Powers had treated China in the past.
|
| I think the problem is-- thinking about my friends in Hong
| Kong-- is that it is hard to find a third way and that may
| not be stable in the long run.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| That is the story if you read western media but it is
| important to remember that there is a massive world outside
| the west where that story is turned on its head: Here the US
| is a frail aging empire that just cannot handle the peaceful
| rise of China, and the idea of it no being the top dog, and
| thus lashes out in an increasing desperate manner.
| noobermin wrote:
| Speaking as someone who now lives in Singapore, this is not
| the universal view outside the west and the rise of China
| is perhaps not warlike in the invading territory sense but
| people are wary of them.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Sorry - just to be clear - just as "Xi is an evil
| dictator" is common but not universal point of view in
| the west; the "US is a declining and aggressive empire"
| is a common but not universal point of view in the rest
| of the world.
| dangus wrote:
| But that is its own form of exaggerated propaganda from the
| opposing side. In reality, America is playing on
| geopolitical easy mode and is essentially too big to fail.
|
| - It has vast natural resources, some like its oil surplus
| are resources that even China needs to import.
|
| - It has a vast, diverse economy that includes high
| representation in high-complexity high-value products like
| software, airplanes, and, yes, semiconductors (Intel
| manufactures 75% of their products in the US).
|
| - It is highly developed and highly educated with
| particular strength in higher education
|
| - It is essentially impossible to physically attack
|
| - It produces a crazy amount of food
|
| - Its multinational corporations own a large amount of
| foreign assets, with a banking system that is entangled
| with the rest of the world
|
| - It is close allies with basically everyone that matters
| except China and Russia, and arguably China is more
| dependent on the US than the US depends on China.
|
| - NAFTA countries are a huge strength to the US. The US now
| buys more from Mexico than China.
|
| - The world's second largest military and navy are
| basically non-existent, and the US military is unmatched in
| logistics.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| The US empire can fall apart without the US mainland
| being invaded or even threathened. Just like the UK
| empire was intact after the second world war but over the
| next three decades completely fell apart.
|
| Simplified empire is about ever increasing conquest and
| exploitation. At one point the conquests and military
| upkeep becomes more expensive than the spoils and the
| whole process starts going in reverse.
|
| Of course I am not saying that this is what is happening
| right now; maybe Russia and China are falling apart and
| we are entering another unipolar moment.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The difference is that the US is not an empire. It's an
| economic hegemony (if you're looking at it from a
| relative power perspective).
|
| Its power stems from sovereign, contiguous territory with
| resources, or a network of global treaties both economic
| and military.
|
| In contrast, Britain was a globe-spanning empire, which
| disintegrated with national independence movements.
|
| The equivalent would be if California and Texas decided
| to split from the United States.
|
| And as the quip goes... the next few largest economies,
| including China, are pretty incentivized to keep the
| global economy rules as-is, because they benefit.
|
| De-dollarization is happening, but is going to be a slow
| shift, with an uncertain outcome.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I think the word empire is too loaded to be useful. And
| mechanisms of conquest and exploitation are different.
| But the core mechanism is the same.
|
| And I think in two hundred years when history is written
| by someone who is dispassionate about it, the US empire
| will be seen a continuation of the UK and Dutch empires
| that was before it.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| IMHO, the Dutch arc is definitely a more sound
| comparison. Albeit, as you say, with the military force
| of the British.
|
| The key difference with the post-WWII economic world
| order was that the US generally tried to ensure that
| everyone else got theirs.
|
| Granted, the US got _more_ , but there was insight that a
| global economy that benefited all was more stable than a
| system that left powerful economies outside, with an
| incentive to topple it.
| baby wrote:
| What happened in HK left a sour taste in the mouth of a lot
| of people. I'm all for China rising but all I see is a
| country still closed to the world.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| > US is a frail aging empire that just cannot handle the
| peaceful rise of China
|
| Not seeing that by the numbers
|
| 1.) The heavy market losses in 2024 come hot on the heels
| of a bruising run last year, when the CSI 300 index,
| comprising 300 major stocks listed in Shanghai and
| Shenzhen, fell more than 11%. By contrast, the United
| States' benchmark S&P 500 index climbed 24% in 2023, while
| Europe's grew almost 13%. Japan's Nikkei 225 soared 28%
| last year and is still going strong, notching gains of
| nearly 10% so far this month.
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/business/china-stock-
| market-f...
|
| 2.) China suffers from deflation, while the rest of the
| world combats inflation. Not only does deflation signal a
| stagnating economy, it can lead to high unemployment,
| unaffordable debt repayment, and dismal outcomes for
| businesses. In the worst cases, deflation can lead an
| economy into a recession, or even a depression.
| https://www.wsj.com/world/china/deflation-worries-deepen-
| in-...
|
| 3.) Crushing debt. Going back further, China accounts for
| over half of the entire world's total debt-to-GDP increases
| since 2008.
| https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/backgrounder-china-
| econo... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01
| -06/bloomb...
|
| 4.) China's youth unemployment rate hit consecutive record
| highs in recent months. From April to June, the jobless
| rate for 16- to 24-year-olds reached 20.4%, 20.8% and 21.3%
| respectively. https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/economy/china-
| economy-july-sl.... For reference, G7 countries is at 10%,
| US is at 8% https://data.oecd.org/unemp/youth-unemployment-
| rate.htm
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Take a moment to consider what you just said. It's just
| that - a story you are getting from the media. If these
| stories change from source to source maybe they're not an
| authority you should appeal to.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Yep.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| Taiwan is basically "captured" by:
|
| 1) Being too close and too dependent on China mainland
|
| 2) Enjoying a huge amount of surplus with China (it
| overweights everything else combined, and almost doubled)
|
| IMO, there is really no point for China to invade Taiwan,
| _even_ if Taiwan declares independence. The best move of
| China, when and if that happens, is to simply grab Jinmen and
| Mazu (the two small islands close to Xiamen), and then start
| a economic debacle of some sort. They don 't even have to put
| up a physical debacle -- the only thing they need to do is to
| remove that surplus by removing all economic preferential
| policies. The best move for Taiwan, is always to be on the
| brink of independence without actually getting into it. After
| all, it is independent in all other ways and it's fine as
| long as US is strong enough.
|
| Now the real point is: Can China put military equipment in
| Taiwan to break through the so-called first island chain? I
| think it's a Yes given enough time. I guess that's why NATO
| has been busily working on the second chain.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there is really no point for China to invade Taiwan_
|
| Which is why, historically, it didn't. But Xi isn't
| rational: he's a dictator.
|
| It wasn't rational for him to force his way onto Hong Kong;
| the territory would automatically become China in a few
| decades. Same for his corruption/loyalty purges and
| decimation of China's tech sector. Irrational, short-term
| sacrifices of China's long-term potential for his short-
| term politics.
| hnfong wrote:
| > It wasn't rational for him to force his way onto Hong
| Kong
|
| When that happened, Hong Kong was involved in ongoing
| riots and people were proclaiming (Hong Kong)
| independence on the streets for months. The legislature
| was stormed in an event that was not unlike Jan 6 Capitol
| Hill in the US (we sure did feel the awkward resemblance
| of the two events...)
|
| Everyone can have their views on whether suppressing the
| riots was morally justified, but Xi had to do something
| to assert the CCP's sovereignty over Hong Kong. It was
| the only rational move unless they were prepared to give
| up Hong Kong.
|
| > the territory would automatically become China in a few
| decades
|
| Not sure which place you're talking about. Hong Kong is
| _already_ part of China at least since the 1997 handover.
| And Taiwan will never become under CCP rule if status quo
| is preserved. Don 't think there's any mechanism for
| "automatically" taking over Taiwan.
|
| I don't know how familiar you are with the history, but
| long-term thinking and patience was essentially the
| reason China was able to gain back control Hong Kong from
| the Brits, pretty much on China's terms. They took
| advantage of the 99-year lease on the New Territories,
| waited until the Brits started developing on the leased
| (as opposed to ceded) land, and caught them with their
| pants down when they realized they had no feasible plan
| to partially hand back the territory when the lease
| expired.
|
| Hong Kong has always been a template (in the CCP's mind
| at least) for taking back Taiwan, I don't know how you'd
| come to the conclusion that they would forego long term
| potential for short term gains. It's like you're talking
| as if they already invaded Taiwan and you're shaking your
| head over the stupidity of it. (No, it hasn't happened
| yet.)
|
| The threat of course always seem real enough. It's all a
| game of chicken. The one who seems most crazy wins. Back
| then during the 1970s, China also threatened to invade
| Hong Kong if the Brits didn't hand it back to them. They
| want you to think the leadership is irrational. Makes
| them harder to predict.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| China was forcing HK to accept China laws and HK didn't
| want it. They protested.
|
| Don't try and and make it sound like HK were just
| randomly protesting nothing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Hong Kong was involved in ongoing riots_
|
| Because Xi ham-fistedly forced through a badly-written
| security law [1] and intervened in its politics [2]. It's
| like stupid Tiannamen Square.
|
| > _long-term thinking and patience was essentially the
| reason China was able to gain back control Hong Kong from
| the Brits_
|
| China _was_ rational under the CCP. It's myopic under Xi.
|
| > _don 't know how you'd come to the conclusion that they
| would forego long term potential for short term gains_
|
| They already did.
|
| Hong Kong's mess was avoidable. Most Taiwanese
| identifying as Taiwanese and _not_ Chinese was avoidable
| [3]. The trade wars, and China being reeclipsed in
| manufacturing by U.S. + Japan + Deutschland, were
| avoidable [4]. The bank losses on overseas loans were
| avoidable [5]. The corruption in the rocket forces, which
| guarantees no Taiwan action until China's military
| strength is _past_ its relative nadir, was avoidable [6].
|
| All of these missteps would not have happened under
| proper CCP leadership. They are expressions of Xi's
| personal hubris. China sacrificed the immortality of its
| state for the favour of its mortal dictator; it's
| possibly the luckiest geopolitical stroke for America
| after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
|
| > _during the 1970s, China also threatened to invade Hong
| Kong if the Brits didn 't hand it back to them. They want
| you to think the leadership is irrational_
|
| But they didn't. That's rational.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_extrad
| ition_b...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-56264117
|
| [3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2024/01/16/most-peop...
|
| [4] https://www.safeguardglobal.com/resources/top-10-manu
| facturi...
|
| [5] https://www.ft.com/content/da01c562-ad29-4c34-ae5e-a0
| aafddd3...
|
| [6] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-military-
| rocket-f...
| vkou wrote:
| > But Xi isn't rational: he's a dictator.
|
| This is a non-sequitor. There's no reason, a priori, to
| believe a dictator is any less, or more rational than a
| popular idiot (and we've elected quite a few of those).
|
| (You also don't _stay_ a dictator for very long by being
| a madman or an idiot, whereas an elected official usually
| at least gets to finish their term.)
| bee_rider wrote:
| Leaders serve the interests of those that have a say in
| whether or not they stay in power--in democratic
| countries with wide enfranchisement, that's the
| population in general, in other systems it might be a
| combination of the military, party, international
| supporters, and the populace.
|
| I think what people mean when they say a country "acts
| rationally" or doesn't is that decisions are made that
| vaguely make sense in when analyzed by applying the
| rationalism framework to "the country," usually used as a
| shorthand for the populace. But of course, this would
| only make sense if the leaders decide that the best way
| to stay in power is to serve the interest of the
| populace. Which isn't the case in a non-democratic
| country.
|
| Rationalism is a framework in international relations,
| and it makes sense that some terms-of-art will sneak out
| into informal English. Unfortunately, in English,
| "irrational" is also, basically, a fancy way of saying
| somebody makes stupid decisions. And lots of countries
| that are, broadly, antagonistic toward the US are not
| representative democracies*. So it seems to have
| basically morphed into a way of saying that my country's
| adversaries are stupid. An unfortunate end for an
| otherwise interesting term.
|
| * not to say that we _haven't_ been willing to morally
| compromise ourselves and ally up with dictators or
| overthrow democracies.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _no reason, a priori, to believe a dictator is any
| less, or more rational than a popular idiot (and we 've
| elected quite a few of those)_
|
| Dictators are less constrained and longer serving. The
| latter is particularly damning, since it means the need
| to save face prevents course corrections.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I'm concerned that Xi might be more concerned with leaving
| a legacy than with practical goals when it comes to Taiwan.
| The civil war was never fully won and resolving that seems
| important to him. I hope it's just posturing.
|
| On the feasibility of an invasion: there was a very good
| episode of the Sinica podcast on wargaming this:
| https://thechinaproject.com/2023/08/17/wargaming-a-taiwan-
| in...
|
| Very scary for everyone and especially the US. Think
| several lost carriers within the first 24-36 hrs
|
| Edit: important to note that at the end of the episode they
| discuss that the wargaming exercise assumed < 100 dedicated
| amphibian landing boats, but Chinese officials have
| previously said that they'd use their merchant marine which
| would mean we are talking about thousand of ships! The
| whole thing is unfathomable and clearly unprecedented since
| WWII
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is going to come to Taiwan's aid if
| a major invasion comes up. There will be material and
| intelligence support, for sure, but sending troops? Not
| so sure.
|
| I agree that Xi probably wants some legacy coined to him,
| but he is only 70 and looks pretty healthy (as far as I
| see) so I guess he can still wait it out.
|
| I still don't believe there is going to be an invasion of
| Taiwan happening in the next few years, but if it does, I
| think it's going to be a lot bigger than just Taiwan.
| From this perspective, it is scary.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Declaring closed straits to Chinese military surface
| vessels on the Taiwan-Philippines and Taiwan-Japan gaps,
| along with resupply of Taiwan from the east, seems a
| reasonable response for the US (and possibly Japan).
|
| China's calculus changes if they have to strike Japanese
| and Philippine sovereign territory (even if it's hosting
| US forces) in order to accomplish their goals.
|
| And it's unclear if even Xi is willing to send as many
| ships and bodies as it would take to the bottom of
| Taiwanese straits to get an invasion force across. (Which
| then faces a guerrilla insurgency in mountainous terrain)
|
| If Xi sees Taiwan as a gateway to Pacific hegemony, maybe
| that math is worth it...
|
| But asking a populace to support that in the face of
| economic weakness and high youth unemployment is a tall
| order. The COVID lockdown riots demonstrated that even
| China's social control is a fine line.
| macintux wrote:
| Many leaders have discovered that war against an external
| enemy is a powerful unifier, at least in the short to
| medium term. I would never assume that Xi won't
| eventually take advantage of that.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Honestly, Russia invading Ukraine, the global economic
| response to Russia, and China seeing all of that...
| probably saved Taiwan.
|
| China doesn't have the natural resource base within its
| borders (they're digging up their iron ore reserves
| faster than any country, and they have to import oil)
| that Russia does.
|
| Consequently, economic sanctions slow their economy down
| a _lot_ faster than Russia 's.
|
| War may be an internal unifier... but unemployment,
| poverty, and scarcity is a rapid internal disintegrator.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| China is in no shape to invade, being in a great
| depression https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2024
| /01/22/chinas-..., up to its eyeballs in debt, and having
| horrible demographics. And having horrible tax base.
|
| For reference, when Germany and Japan was expanding, they
| had great, young demographics, and thus very good tax
| base. Japan had very low debt in 1920 when they started
| the wars
| https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/columns/s15_0004.html. Germany
| had suspended the gold standard and financed the war by
| borrowing, something China cannot do today.
|
| Another way to think about this is, instead of all the
| possible money China made that it could have spent on
| war, instead it decided to build half-finished tofu dreg
| buildings, then the CCP elites took those dirty money out
| of China and into western economies :). Even the elites
| knew China was no match for the combined wealth/forces of
| western countries.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| Also, the Chinese army in general is probably non-
| functional. Too much corruption, case in point: Corrupt
| Chinese Officials Filled Missiles With Water, Report Says
| https://www.newsweek.com/china-missiles-rocket-fuel-
| corrupt-...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That is piss-poor journalism. Most military rockets are
| solid fueled, for one.
|
| Perun covers the topic of Chinese military readiness with
| excellent sourcing and great detail, as always:
|
| https://youtu.be/vhI_tTEE2ZQ
| gentleman11 wrote:
| What state was Russia in before the Ukraine invasion?
| Putin and Xi aren't leading democracies, they can do
| whatever they want. Their countries are basically their
| property. Neither will go hungry if their country has a
| famine, etc
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| But you also need consider that the Chinese demographics
| are basically only going to get worse from here. Their
| dependeny ratio is going to get really bad, like it could
| be 1.5 retirement age people per 1 working age person.
|
| Are they gonna try and fight a war while the average
| soldier has more then one aging parent back on the
| mainland?
|
| Who would do the domestic production to support the effort?
|
| If China ever wants to do it they need to do it in the next
| couple decades
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-
| facts...
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| I actually don't think they want a war. They are
| preparing for a war, that's for sure, but to start one,
| with NATO? That's not a good idea. Time is China's friend
| at least for the next decade as you mentioned.
| foobarian wrote:
| Where is NATO in this picture? There is no alliance
| trigger with a Taiwan invasion.
| bluGill wrote:
| There isn't in the case of Ukraine either, but NATO has
| mostly stepped up anyway. Sure we are not putting troops
| on the ground (yet???) but NATO has provided a lot of
| support.
|
| Countries like South Korea, Japan, Philippians, and
| Australia are likely to get scared if China does too much
| and send some form of help.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Where is NATO in this picture?_
|
| Nowhere. The relevant alliances are AUKUS [1] and the
| Quad [2].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrilateral_Securit
| y_Dialo...
| berserk1010 wrote:
| > Being too close and too dependent on China mainland
|
| This is changing quickly.
|
| New investments in China by Taiwanese companies declined
| 10.4 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of the year
| (2023) to US$758 million...That follows an almost 14
| percent decrease in such investment last year.https://www.t
| aipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2023/04/21/2...
|
| Exodus of Taiwanese businesses from China: push and pull
| factors amidst trade and tech tensions
| https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=3573
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| We are going to see when the 2024 report is out. AFAIK
| the huge trade surplus is still there.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| > It's crazy to me that you haven't see more divestments in
| China from Taiwanese companies.
|
| There is a ton of divestment, what do you mean?
|
| New investments in China by Taiwanese companies declined 10.4
| percent year-on-year in the first quarter of the year (2023)
| to US$758 million...That follows an almost 14 percent
| decrease in such investment last year.https://www.taipeitimes
| .com/News/front/archives/2023/04/21/2...
|
| According to a survey conducted by the Center for Strategic
| and International Studies Trustee Chair in Chinese Business
| and Economics, over a quarter of surveyed Taiwanese firms
| with operations in China had already moved some of their
| production or sourcing out of China, while another third were
| considering doing so in the near-term.
| https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=3573
|
| Apple Aims to Make a Quarter of the World's iPhones in India.
| Supplier Foxconn plans to build more factories and give India
| a production role once limited mostly to China
| https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-aims-to-make-a-quarter-of-
| the...
| gwern wrote:
| > _New_ investments in China by Taiwanese companies
| declined 10.4 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of
| the year (2023) to US$758 million...That follows an almost
| 14 percent decrease in such investment last year
|
| How's _total_ investment going? If the flow is still
| greater than zero, then presumably the stock is still
| increasing... It 's a funny sort of 'divestment' where you
| have more invested (and at risk) every year.
| brokencode wrote:
| Investing less every year is how you eventually get to
| investing nothing and finally to reducing total footprint
| every year in China.
|
| It makes sense that this is a slow process when you
| consider the massive scale and complexity of the supply
| chains involved.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| A decrease of prior investment level is divestment, just
| not happening all at once. If you want to see that kind
| of activity:
|
| Foreign investors have snatched back nearly 90% (!!!) of
| the money they put into Chinese stocks this year (2023)
| https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/china-
| econom...
| jahnu wrote:
| There is actually a ton of reshoring going on in the EU. They
| are just relatively quiet about it. Here's a database that only
| goes up to 2018
|
| https://reshoring.eurofound.europa.eu/reshoring-cases
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| I wonder if this is relating now to remote work as well?
|
| Been seeing a lot more "Remote only in EU/UK" type roles, and
| when I ask they're explicitly not catering to other timezone-
| aligned regions.
| jahnu wrote:
| Good question but I don't know to be honest.
| krab wrote:
| I was hiring that way in the previous company I worked for.
| Before we decided that, we had a few good candidates from
| UA and several African countries because initially we
| thought we'd limit only by the time zones.
|
| In the end, we decided for EU/UK because of law
| compatibility, ease of enforcement (in case we would have
| to deal with some serious problems) and ease of gathering
| together from time to time.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Every major country is trying to build new fabs as fast as they
| can. ASML (maker of the highest resolution lithography
| machines) has a 400% increase in orders for their equiopment.
| This isn't a decision of "Japan instead of US", the US is
| building as many fabs as they can, so is Japan, so is Europe
| newsclues wrote:
| Seems like everyone is chasing the high end fans, but what
| about basic components and PCBs? The supply chain is more
| than latest node chips!
| amelius wrote:
| Have you noticed a shortage of low-end components?
| Qwertious wrote:
| Raspberry pis were chronically in short supply for the
| last 3 years and were scalped to $80-100, to the point
| where x86 microPCs were cheaper.
| christina97 wrote:
| That has nothing to do with the broader ecosystem and has
| all to do with RPi's weird relationship with Broadcom.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Do you have a source? I've seen a lot of unsubstantiated
| rumors about the source of the raspberry pi shortage.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Wasn't that just because everyone wanted the RPis
| themselves, not because of shortages of their components?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Raspberry Pi claimed it was a shortage issue. I think if
| the issue was an increase in demand they would have
| wanted to say so publicly as it would make them look
| good.
| TillE wrote:
| There were plenty of component shortages in very recent
| memory (eg, FPGAs), but those were all down to the
| pandemic.
| qxfys wrote:
| > building a factory in the US is just not feasible
|
| Please educate me. why?
| MichaelTheGeek wrote:
| I wonder what he's thinking when he said that.
| poochipie wrote:
| Not OP, but: TSMC has tried before. The workforce is not
| educated properly and the workplace cultures are vastly
| different. In this case, the US workers were used to stronger
| labor protections than their Taiwanese counterparts.
| edgyquant wrote:
| The US has multiple fabs and has multiple more being built
| right now. This is just the propaganda of the elite class
| who sold off our industrial base and you're repeating it
| verbatim
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Every year it becomes harder to justify hiring a
| Westerner from a business perspective. America in 50
| years will look like Argentina, full of mediocre workers
| that demand empire era wages. If we wanna change that, we
| need to work on developing global monopolies and crushing
| our enemies. Won't happen though, we'll just wither away
| wondering why our economy is wasting away.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I'll take this bet and see you in 50 years. The US has
| surged ahead of the rest of the world in recent years and
| it's only just starting to put itself first again.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| How? Our industries are being hollowed out. More and more
| engineering jobs will go to China, Taiwan, Ukraine,
| Poland, etc. where they are paid half of a westnern's
| salary and perform nearly as well if not better. This
| trend will only continue until the U.S is cut out of the
| equation entirely. Sure we're doing better than Canada,
| but Canada is the prime example of a country in decline.
| They won't need to wait 50 years to be Argentina. Same
| with many other Western countries.
| jd3 wrote:
| This is exactly right. Onshoring fabs back to the US is
| part of a long term political and economic strategic plan
| to counter China called The Clean Network / The "5G
| trifecta" -- TSMC's new fab in Arizona will be the
| largest onshoring in American history.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Network#The_%225G
| _tr...
|
| https://keithkrach.com/article/tsmc-12b-chip-plant-in-
| arizon...
| rayiner wrote:
| > This is just the propaganda of the elite class who sold
| off our industrial base and you're repeating it verbatim
|
| They're socializing Americans to get used to a future
| where their kids have to go to the Middle East and China
| in search of upwards mobility. (Of course those societies
| will never be as accommodating of Americans as America
| has been of Chinese and middle Easterners.)
| poochipie wrote:
| I'm unaware of how automatable fabs are. If the workers
| are high-cost then the machines need to do more or the
| government needs to subsidize production.
| kevinpet wrote:
| One of them is about five miles from me in Phoenix and
| it's going poorly. My read is that there are some
| legitimate labor concerns, some mismanagement, but also a
| lot of special interest strong arming in things like not
| bringing in enough Taiwanese workers.
| CPLX wrote:
| This point of view should be recognized as the propaganda
| that it is.
|
| TSMC could easily open facilities in the US they just don't
| want to pay what it costs.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| Exactly, people think you need a genius to work in a fab
| when, in reality, there are more than enough people you
| could train, most American students come out of
| university ready for it;
|
| It's just that they end up working in a startup creating
| yet another project management tool because of the way
| capital is allocated in the US and how high salaries are
| in certain areas.
|
| No country will ever be competent at everything; the US
| doesn't need fabs. The best for the US in this situation
| is to figure out how they can outsource this to cheaper
| countries that are democratic and not possibly the
| victims of an invasion soon.
|
| In Asia itself (for the distance factor to Taiwan or TSMC
| headquarters), there are plenty of booming countries
| economies that, despite having a slightly higher cost
| (due to supply chain dynamics) than Taiwan, have a more
| stable foreign policy and good legal framework.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I disagree. We do need fabs because we need the
| expertise.
|
| As we do have fabs and do have the expertise. Intel
| produces all of their most advanced chips in the USA. The
| chips are competitively priced and made with US wages
| so...
| poochipie wrote:
| How do we convince people to pay for the more expensive
| chips? More automation? Government subsidies? Other?
| baq wrote:
| Translation: the business didn't want to pay enough
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| I have a friend in Taiwan who works as an engineer for an
| LED manufacturer. He makes about 2K USD a month. I don't
| think anyone would even clean toilets for that much in
| the US. US salaries are just not globally competitive.
|
| And yet salaries in the US are sustained. To me it looks
| like the issue is that while we know how to start
| companies and have VC capital, we don't know how to
| outsource well (even with all the local immigrants)
| LoganDark wrote:
| > He makes about 2K USD a month. I don't think anyone
| would even clean toilets for that much in the US.
|
| Do you mean to say that's low pay or high pay compared to
| the US?
|
| In the US, 2k USD a month would barely be enough to rent
| a small apartment, let alone pay for utilities and
| groceries. You'd be left homeless or starving.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's low pay. That's $12 an hour.
|
| The majority of Americans of all races and genders earn
| above $15 an hour [0]
|
| Taiwan's average wage (so skewed upwards) was ~$22k a
| year in 2023 [1]. That was an 8 year high btw - wages
| have been much lower.
|
| Lots of White Collar Taiwanese would move to Mainland
| China for that reason - they'd earn similar if not higher
| salaries in Mainland China AND not pay income tax.
|
| Basically, OP's point is that companies don't optimize
| for wages alone (and I can attest to that having hired
| abroad, and helped move the operations of a former
| employer to Israel+India from the US).
|
| Even TSMC's founder admitted that:
|
| On a podcast hosted by the Brookings Institution last
| year, Chang lamented what he called a lack of
| "manufacturing talents" in the United States, owing to
| generations of ambitious Americans flocking to finance
| and internet companies instead. ("I don't really think
| it's a bad thing for the United States, actually," he
| said, "but it's a bad thing for trying to do
| semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.") [2]
|
| [0] -
| https://nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/Wages_15-hr
|
| [1] - https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202311290017
|
| [2] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/14/taiwan-
| tech-king-pe...
| yolo3000 wrote:
| I have no knowledge of this field, but my naive question
| would be, wouldn't building such advanced products
| involve so much more automation relative to number of
| human workers, that the salary of workers doesn't affect
| the cost that much?
| alephnerd wrote:
| > the salary of workers doesn't affect the cost that much
|
| It doesn't and that's why Intel still has foundaries in
| Oregon and Arizona.
|
| The difference is TSMC's leadership doesn't want to play
| ball with American work culture and wants to keep pushing
| the 996 mentality (yes, even Taiwan has an extreme
| overwork and underpay problem).
|
| The Foundary space is a very low margin industry. There's
| a reason why the only companies left are TSMC, Samsung,
| Intel, and GlobalFoundaries.
|
| While the TSMC plant in Chandler has been plagued with
| bad press, the Intel plant right next door has been
| expanding with almost no hiccups.
| hollerith wrote:
| Or maybe US workers are worth their high salary, and that
| is why the high US salaries are sustained.
| randerson wrote:
| If they paid what US workers expect, the chips would cost
| so much that nobody would buy them.
| poochipie wrote:
| This is the effort from the 90s to which I am referring:
|
| https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/04/tsmcs-
| morr...
|
| "We still have about a thousand workers in that factory,
| and that factory, they cost us about 50% more than Taiwan
| costs," Chang said.
| throttlebody wrote:
| 50% doesn't seem that much, but it really needs to be
| compared to production. Geographical risk spread will
| always cost you.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I was recently chatting with someone in that industry but not
| at TSMC. It's that they assumed Taiwanese workplace,
| cultural, government, and business norms will work here.
| There's chip manufacturing in the US, so it's not that it
| _can 't_ work. It just won't be the same as Taiwan.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I wonder if he means getting people with PhDs to work
| grueling hours in an assembly line.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| OP never followed up his many claims with responses nor
| numbers, and had many wrong things that were disproven. I
| wouldn't bother.
| Giorgi wrote:
| Well EU is busy getting out of having their supply routs and
| clientele being depended on Russia, can't really exit two
| failing tyrannic dictatorships at the same time - can you?
|
| Communist China is still in recession and as manufacturing
| keeps exiting to India and other places, Chinese market won't
| be that attractive anytime soon.
|
| No wonder real Chinese (Taiwanese) companies want backup plants
| elsewhere and are not interested into selling-off to failing
| dystopian dictatorships.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| Correct, Europe would be wise to detach from China faster
|
| Exports to the EU fell 11% from a year earlier to $38.3
| billion in November compared
| https://apnews.com/article/china-exports-imports-decline-
| eco...
|
| China's newly appointed defense chief and Shoigu discussed
| boosting military cooperation and coordination as the Russia-
| Ukraine war drags onhttps://www.newsweek.com/china-russia-
| ukraine-war-dong-jun-c...
| randomcarbloke wrote:
| They didn't lose it, they volunteered it, supporting not only
| the embargo but the spirit of the embargo...rightfully.
|
| Opening a factory in the USA means jeopardizing the safety of
| Taiwan to some extent, they were all for it, and as far as I
| know as of late last year was reading to begin staffing and
| production, however the US administration backed off their
| enthusiasm and support leaving the factory stranded, an
| absolute fucking catastrophe.
| Rapzid wrote:
| > Opening a factory in the USA means jeopardizing the safety
| of Taiwan to some extent
|
| It doesn't which is why they are all for it. Diversifying
| TSMCs production base geographically weakens China's hand.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I'm out of the loop, why was building a factory in the US not
| feasible?
| georgeburdell wrote:
| U.S. doesn't work 996, TSMC tried to import all of the senior
| staff from Taiwan leading to cultural mismatch and resentment
| Mistletoe wrote:
| >The 996 working hour system (Chinese: 996Gong Zuo Zhi ) is
| a work schedule practiced by some companies in China. It
| derives its name from its requirement that employees work
| from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week; i.e. 72 hours per
| week, 12 hours per day. A number of Mainland Chinese
| internet companies have adopted this system as their
| official work schedule. Critics argue that the 996 working
| hour system is a violation of Chinese Labour Law and have
| called it "modern slavery".
|
| Oh good Lord. I wonder if anyone has insight into how this
| is actually done. Are people really working the 72 hours or
| is it like here, people goofing off most of the day and
| hurrying up to get done when they need to?
|
| These posts seem to imply the latter?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/boq5qe/what_the_996
| _...
| omgJustTest wrote:
| "Contrast that to the US and Europe who keep talking about
| these things, but don't actually execute(although the US at
| least tries to throw money at the problem)."
|
| What other things should governments do other than "throw money
| at the problem"... crazy profitable ventures should have some
| help but they aren't giving those grants back etc.
|
| I'd say total compensation packages in orgs are the root of why
| things might work in Japan and not in the US. The pay structure
| in Japan is very rigid, and by just one metric, top executive
| pay [1], Japan is 3.4x more efficient.
|
| While a highly-paid CEO may not break the company, the skew in
| pay upward across an org will.
|
| [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26592017#:~:text=After%20contr
| o....
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >they immediately acted to bring manufacturing of giants such
| as Iris Ohyama back to Japan. Contrast that to the US and
| Europe who keep talking about these things, but don't actually
| execute
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by this because the US already has
| Intel 4 while Japan currently has zero advanced fabs. Is this
| just another Japan good comment or do you have a specific point
| in mind?
| berserk1010 wrote:
| Lots of wrong things with the comments
|
| > Contrast that to the US and Europe who keep talking about
| these things, but don't actually execute(although the US at
| least tries to throw money at the problem).
|
| "Our analysis of multiple surveys indicates that as much as 91
| percent of U.S. manufacturers have reshored some production in
| 2022, up from just 7 percent 2012. "
| https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/98200-a-look-back-at-20...
|
| China's annual exports drop for first time in seven years.
| Among key trading partners, exports to the U.S. led the
| decline, down 13% from the previous year
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade/China-s-annual-exports...
|
| > TSMC lost the Chinese market...South Korean officials on the
| other hand lobbied heavily to get long term exemptions, which
| allowed them to turn around their profit situation.
|
| Samsung profit tumbles 35% as chip weakness persists.
| https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3248969/china-rem...
|
| Over 50% of Korean firms missing earnings target in China this
| year: survey
| https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230830000611
| thfuran wrote:
| >Our analysis of multiple surveys indicates that as much as
| 91 percent of U.S. manufacturers have reshored some
| production in 2022, up from just 7 percent 2012.
|
| 'Some' is doing a lot of work. What does that really mean? If
| 99% of manufacturers each onshore 0.01% of their
| manufacturing, all that has really happened is that everyone
| can probably now label things "made in america".
| berserk1010 wrote:
| here are some numbers
|
| U.S. manufacturing construction spending reached a 20-year
| high, hitting a $194 billion annual rate in April 2023,
| nearly double the $107 billion annual rate from a year ago.
| https://thinkkc.com/news/blog/kc-smartport-
| blog/2023/08/01/i...
|
| In 2021, Intel announced more than $43.5 billion in new
| manufacturing investments across Arizona, New Mexico and
| Ohio to bolster U.S. chipmaking and R&D leadership.
| https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-
| releases/detail/1638/...
|
| Walmart previously announced a $350 billion investment to
| make U.S. manufacturing more "affordable and feasible,"
|
| https://www.sme.org/technologies/articles/2023/october/resh
| o...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > U.S. manufacturing construction spending reached a
| 20-year high
|
| A _nominal_ 20-year high and the increase is since the
| pandemic. Also this is for construction. Here are some
| other time series:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
|
| Walmart $350 billion investment is over 10 years and
| mostly is for agriculture and some small electronics.
|
| Also this source is an American manufacturing lobbying
| group.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| here are some more
|
| companies have announced over $166 billion in
| manufacturing in semiconductors and electronics, and at
| least 50 community colleges in 19 states have announced
| new or expanded programming to help American workers
| access good-paying jobs in the semiconductor industry.
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-
| releases...
|
| Apple commits $430 billion in US investments over five
| years https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-
| commits-430-bil...
|
| Microsoft will buy enough U.S.-made solar panels to power
| 1.8 million homes
| https://www.greenbiz.com/article/microsoft-will-buy-
| enough-u...
|
| Tesla plans to spend $3.6 billion more on battery and
| truck manufacturing in Nevada
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/tesla-plans-to-
| spend-3point6...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Our analysis of multiple surveys indicates that as much as
| 91 percent of U.S. manufacturers have reshored some
| production in 2022, up from just 7 percent 2012.
|
| You should always be skeptical of statistics written this
| way. It is a very unintuitive way to aggregate and suggests
| that this is the strongest number they could find.
| adventured wrote:
| Perhaps, however, the re-shoring is in fact happening.
| There has been a massive build out of new manufacturing
| facilities in the US over the last few years.
|
| Near $120 billion spent on new manufacturing facilities in
| 2022 alone. The surge looks like this:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Bydq6Hb.png
|
| The US manufacturing sector has added 900,000 jobs since
| 2014 (according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics). It
| was at 12,081,000 manufacturing jobs in January 2014, and
| January 2024 is at 12,979,000. For the US, which is
| supposed to be a wilting manufacturer, that's a huge gain
| over a decade (including the pandemic hit, which slashed
| 700,000 jobs out temporarily; one guesses the figure would
| just be even higher minus the pandemic).
|
| Manufacturers don't add a million jobs if they're not
| expanding presence. Even if they were expanding very
| slowly, they would do everything possible to avoid adding
| jobs/labor (most US manufacturing expansion in decades past
| came from productivity gains).
|
| The US has modest corporate taxes, a good business
| regulatory environment, amazing capital markets, enormous
| economic scale, a single giant market, ports that can
| easily get you to Asia/Europe/Latin America, consumers, and
| labor. It makes perfect sense that at a time of growing
| risk of conflict with China, that the US would be
| reshoring.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Also, wouldn't be surprised if the drive towards minimal-
| latency shipping is having some evening effect.
|
| Increased labor costs... versus rapid, $$ last-minute
| transport / port fees to hide latency across the Pacific.
|
| At some point, it's just cheaper to pay the manufacturer
| more, if they can more rapidly respond to demand.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Paying more just doesn't work if a chokepoint is clogged
| up or closed. Chinese ports locking down, congestion at
| LA/Long Beach, Panama running dry, Suez being blocked,
| the Red Sea crisis, etc. It is making just-in-time
| inventory untenable.
|
| Canada and Mexico have multiple entry points without as
| severe risk.
| SCM-Enthusiast wrote:
| > https://i.imgur.com/Bydq6Hb.png
|
| Looks like an inflation graph to me.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Without any source information it may as well be written
| in crayon. (No offense. At least op provided _something_
| to back their claim.)
| chaostheory wrote:
| What people arguing against your points don't understand
| is that globalism is coming to an end. It started when
| China initiated decoupling and started their ill advised
| wolf warrior diplomacy.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| in favor of 'friend-shoring' not really 're-shoring'
| ponector wrote:
| Is it? From what I see, global trade is free as never
| been in previous century or any time in history before.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > The US has modest corporate taxes, a good business
| regulatory environment, amazing capital markets,
|
| Yep!
|
| > ports that can easily get you to Asia/Europe/Latin
| America, consumers,
|
| Yep!
|
| > and labor
|
| Nope. Labor costs in the US are ridiculous and make it
| non-economical for most consumer manufacturing. This is
| why real output remains low and we are exploring 'friend-
| shoring.'
| andyferris wrote:
| Well... I believe labor in the US is cheaper than
| Australia, NZ, UK, and most of the EU. (I'm not sure
| about Japan). Basically all comparable countries in terms
| of wealth. So that's something?
| ponector wrote:
| Tesla pays 20-30$ per hour. Is it ridiculous and non-
| economical?
| acchow wrote:
| > It was at 12,081,000 manufacturing jobs in January
| 2014, and January 2024 is at 12,979,000.
|
| That is 7.4% growth since 2014.
|
| US population grew by 6.4% during that same period. Hard
| to see the "huge gain" here.
| pksebben wrote:
| So like, if you're going to present contrary evidence,
| quoting an article by a party with a vested interest that
| claims they "analyzed multiple surveys" and then fails to
| link to them or even name them is not exactly helpful.
|
| I'm not arguing the point, mostly because I still don't have
| reliable evidence to argue about.
| vkou wrote:
| > "Our analysis of multiple surveys indicates that as much as
| 91 percent of U.S. manufacturers have reshored some
| production in 2022, up from just 7 percent 2012. "
| https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/98200-a-look-back-
| at-20...
|
| With no numbers or rules for the numerator and the
| denominator, and no clear methodology, and no clear
| understanding of the biases and the agendas of the authors,
| these ratios are meaningless.
| hmm37 wrote:
| Annual exports dropped on a dollar basis but not when using
| RMB. On the other hand if you were to check Japan's exports,
| which newspapers are more likely to report on a Yen basis, it
| states exports are up due to weaker yen by quite a bit, but
| if you use dollar basis, it's down by more than 10%.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| Most Chinese factories in 2023, due to way less orders and
| needing to clear out their over inventory, had to cut their
| margins dramatically. thus, more shipped out, but making
| way less. They won't be able to do that in 2024, with
| factory shutdowns due to no margins and no more inventory.
| and that's why:
|
| - Chinese stock market has dropped 11% this year, with 3
| year cumulative loss of 6 trillion in 3 years
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/23/investing/china-stock-
| market-...
|
| - Chinese economy is suffering from deflation
|
| - China's youth unemployment rate hit consecutive record
| highs in recent months. From April to June, the jobless
| rate for 16- to 24-year-olds reached 20.4%, 20.8% and 21.3%
| respectively
| 2devnull wrote:
| Why focus on youth employment? Not that I disagree China
| economy is the toilet. But I do think they have a more
| nimble economy that can turn around quicker.
|
| If your thesis is that world manufacturing is leaving
| China to return (primarily) to the US that seems
| unlikely. More likely it will move to places like Africa
| and South America, no? We would expect that to happen as
| China economy transitions and they become the dominant
| world super power.
| berserk1010 wrote:
| > they have a more nimble economy that can turn around
| quicker
|
| That's not evident in the persistent high youth
| unemployment rate. There is also something called middle
| income trap
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap
|
| > they become the dominant world super power.
|
| There's no sign that that is guaranteed. No sign in
| culture power. No sign in economic power. No sign in
| demographics power. No sign in innovation power. No sign
| in technology power. No sign in military power.
| breathen wrote:
| > Our analysis of multiple surveys indicates that as much as
| 91 percent of U.S. manufacturers have reshored some
| production in 2022
|
| I'm not touching the rest, but this seems like an obvious fig
| leaf for largely _failing_ to bring production home.
| corethree wrote:
| >I think a while back TSMC finally understood that building a
| factory in the US is just not feasible
|
| TSMC always understood this. This wasn't a realization as the
| cost benefit analysis is obvious: US workers don't have the
| skill involved and they demand higher pay. The combination of
| the two makes the US plant a net loss.
|
| TSMC did what they did because of political pressure. So the
| plan was always for the US plant to just satisfy that political
| pressure as much as possible. There was never a plan for the US
| plant to do anything profitable, it's more of a forced
| "technology transfer".
| adventured wrote:
| It's nothing like a forced technology transfer at all. The US
| isn't acquiring TSMC tech in any manner what-so-ever. It
| could hack TSMC - as China does the US - if that's what it
| wanted.
|
| The US is adding such domestic manufacturing for strategic
| national security reasons: namely, a modern tech-heavy
| economy can't function without the chips that power it. And
| yes, of course it pressured TSMC to contribute to that.
| corethree wrote:
| It's technology transfer. And it won't be obtained all
| through legal means.
|
| Hacking isn't enough the amount of skill involved can't be
| gleaned from a computer file.
|
| You need US based employees who can be poached who are
| doing espionage and all that. This is entirely what it's
| for. CIA and other defense agencies do this worse stuff.
| What I'm saying isn't out of the blue. And it's also quite
| obvious. There's really no real difference between
| manufacturing here or abroad so that is the only reason why
| they bring it here.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Having a facility that's not on the ring of fire and avoiding
| any earthquakes or similar natural disasters are also big
| benefits. Apple also invested with TSMC by buying out all 3nm
| production.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > a while back TSMC finally understood that building a factory
| in the US is just not feasible
|
| Why would that be? There are plenty of fabs in the US.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| They probably won't work for $30-40k per year and think it is
| a lot of money
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Well, that's certainly a narrative.
|
| But a more likely reason is Japan has excellent infrastructure
| and the Yen is at a record low (and falling).
| rkagerer wrote:
| With all this capital investment and the physics approaching an
| asymptote, my gut says we're going to see fabbed chips become
| more commoditized in 20 years (with lower pricing and more
| competition), and I'm excited for that! Imagine if you could
| order a fab run as frictionless as ordering business cards.
| wil421 wrote:
| I thought companies were doing this for old but useful chips?
| There are chip manufactures who buy old fabs and then do runs
| for chips that go in automobiles/boats/whatever. At least, it
| was my assumption.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Canon's new litho might make low-volume very frictionless:
|
| https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html
| doikor wrote:
| > with lower pricing and more competition
|
| Every node shrink since 7nm (some say 28nm) has increased the
| price per transistor.
|
| So if we keep going for smaller and smaller nodes expect prices
| to keep on rising. Once we reach some physical limit that we
| can't figure out how to solve is when you can expect prices to
| stagnate/lower (and progress stops too)
| dcow wrote:
| Does this account for macroeconomic effects?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Thing is, fab building, integrating production machinery, fab
| supply chain, and operations still has a lot of special sauce
| in it. Some of those factors are not affected by transistor
| physics converging at a limit.
|
| But, for less than cutting-edge chips, if your budget is a bit
| more than for printing on paper, it's getting there.
| trashtester wrote:
| We may be getting close to the limit for 2D density, but have
| just barely started moving in the 3rd dimension.
|
| Chips are also quite small, limited partly by the ability to
| cool them once they enter a computer and partly because a
| single defect often means the whole chip must be discarded
| (which means large chips generatel lower yields).
|
| I suspect we will see much more development in all of these
| directions, with individual chips extending deeper into 3d and
| getting improved tolerance to defects allowing them to get
| larger, as well as with chiplet, die-2-die, stacking and
| similar methods of combining chips in a package continuing to
| move forward at a rapid pace.
|
| I don't think we should expect foundry development to stagnate
| in the near future. If anything, as AI starts to be used in
| developing new chips, it may well accelerate.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> We may be getting close to the limit for 2D density, but
| have just barely started moving in the 3rd dimension.
|
| Nah, 3D is already well under way. Micron is stacking 232
| layers of memory cells to get high density: https://www.elect
| ronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic...
|
| Flash memory is also increasing the number of bits per cell
| by essentially going analog. So those two thing are why you
| can get 2 TB on your keychain.
|
| Then AMD is doing their 3D V-cache, putting a bunch L3 or L4
| cache on a die stacked on top of the CPU. The issue there is
| that both the CPU and cache dissipate too much heat to keep
| stacking higher much higher.
|
| GPUs are using HBM memory which is also stacked, but again
| power dissipation is going to limit how far that can go.
|
| Even in low end devices - Raspberry Pi - we've had DRAM
| stacked on top of the SoC die for many years now.
|
| 20 Years ago 3D was seen as a way to higher levels of
| integration once scaling came to an end, but it's already
| been happening in more and more places as the end of scaling
| is near. Innovations will continue to squeak out slowly for
| some time.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > layers
|
| Thinking in terms of layers is still essentially 2D.
| wins32767 wrote:
| The manufacturing process uses layers, so I'm not sure
| how that follows.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is all just memory and not the processor itself
| phkahler wrote:
| Because logic dissipates a lot more power. You can't
| stack CPU die because the power density goes up linearly
| with the number of chips.
|
| Edit: power per area goes up.
| layer8 wrote:
| A major difficulty with 3D is heat dispersion. It will be
| interesting to see how this will evolve.
| nabakin wrote:
| I don't think we'll see much of a change in how we're
| approaching an asymptote for the foreseeable future. In order
| to do something like that, you would need a significant
| innovation that disrupts the whole trillions of dollars
| industry and it's unusual for a maturing industry to see that
| kind of change. If any one of these innovations were
| significant enough, I think it would have been prioritized
| above the other innovations that have been done instead which
| only get us smaller incremental gains.
|
| I imagine we'll still see gains of 10-15% a generation with
| whatever improvements come over the next few decades but I
| don't see us going back to the gains of the 80s and 90s where
| performance for the end user was doubling regularly, if
| that's what you're hoping for.
|
| Edit: Also I think the price for the performance will
| continue to rise. If we're looking at performance per dollar,
| I think gains will only be in the 5-10% range
| xenadu02 wrote:
| 3D makes every part of your heat story much worse.
|
| You don't want to just stack layers... modern chips already
| have tons of layers and each one is an opportunity to screw
| something up. Stacking of dies has its own problems but
| people are shipping stacked dies and have been for some time
| and as noted the heat is a major problem.
|
| Things will improve but not like they used to. It doesn't
| take that many more scaling nodes before gates are a handful
| of atoms and quantum effects dominate. But really gate sizes
| stopped shrinking a while ago - scaling has been terribly
| uneven for some time.
| coryfklein wrote:
| I am not in the chip industry at all, but I understand that
| chips offload so much heat in part due to cramming as much
| as performance as possible into a small 2D space. If you
| increase the number of layers by 10-20x you now have much
| more "surface area" to work with. Could we see chip designs
| that operate at a much lower voltage (thus minimizing heat)
| and are "slower" as measured by chip frequency, but have
| greater overall bandwidth? Maybe a chip for servers that
| has 256 cores on it, each with their own caches?
|
| From a Moore's law perspective this would continue the
| transistor count doubling trend too.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| It's a larger surface area only if you increase the area
| without increasing the heat generation. That is a heat
| sink. If you want all those layers computing and
| therefore producing heat, then you might as well keep it
| flat and have more fluid moving heat away. In a 3d space
| that fluid is going to be started between different
| layers and reach its carrying capacity of heat quicker.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Some semiconductor segments have been like this forever. You
| don't really care who is making your LM317 voltage regulator
| --- it's a straight up commodity and vendors compete on price
| and availability.
|
| This was the cause of a number of boom/bust cycles in
| semiconductors.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| I'm also wondering whether we're in for another bust. 5ish
| years? Maybe the demand situation is just different this
| time.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| General rule: No, it's not different this time.
|
| Slightly more sophisticated rule: Yes, it's different. But
| it's not _much_ different.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Interesting why Japan and not some EU country. Risk wise, I think
| EU is a safer bet compared to Japan if China attacks Taiwan
| boringuser2 wrote:
| 1. Japan is a vassal state of the US.
|
| 2. Japan has a different work and compensation culture than
| European countries.
|
| 3. China is no discernible threat to Japan.
| krapht wrote:
| 3: Hmmm.
|
| Not according to Japan's 2023 defense white paper.
|
| https://www.mod.go.jp/en/publ/w_paper/wp2023/DOJ2023_Digest_.
| ..
| boringuser2 wrote:
| I wouldn't put much stock in the strategic implications of
| these publicized papers outside of the strategic
| implications being that they want you to think China is a
| discernible threat.
|
| It's similar to the Israel/Iran thing with the end goal
| being trying to drum up the warmongers.
|
| Just reading a few sentences of that, it reads _exactly_
| like warmonger rhetoric that we all know intimately rather
| than inside baseball.
| krapht wrote:
| Uh, are you saying that Iran wouldn't erase Israel from
| the Middle East if they had the capability to do so?
| Where are you going with this? It's indisputable that
| Iran sponsors anti-Israeli militias across the Middle
| East, which would qualify them as a threat.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Israel has nukes, I don't think any country within
| missile range is going to wipe them off the map
| boringuser2 wrote:
| I believe that whether or not Iran _would_ erase Israel
| from the Middle East, which they probably would, along
| with a _certainty_ than Israel not only would erase Iran
| from the Middle East, but has been actively trying to get
| the US to do so for some time -- the reality is that the
| only erasure thus far that has been actually executed in
| earnest is by the Israelis on behalf of the Gazans.
|
| Which would, you know, qualify Israel as "a threat". And
| they certainly are, in many ways.
|
| To what or whom, you haven't really made clear, but
| certainly a threat.
|
| Anyhow, I'm really not interested in this level of
| discussion because it feels extremely superficial. It
| also feels quite gross to either take seriously or
| promote warmonger rhetoric, but that's just my personal
| opinion.
|
| Also, please do not predicate your posts with "uh", it's
| a bit silly.
| Razengan wrote:
| You're the only user here trying to aggravate everyone.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| >having a different opinion is "aggravating"
|
| Why did you post this when it is clearly non-productive
| at best and an obvious terms violation?
| edgyquant wrote:
| If you think Iran isn't a threat to Israel I believe it
| is your opinion we shouldn't put much stock in
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Israel is a larger threat to Iran than Iran is to Israel,
| I think that's relatively obvious and can't really be
| argued.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Israel is not an existential threat to the existence of
| Iran. What world do you live in?
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Iran has started no wars in recent memory, killed no
| civilians, etc.
|
| Iran has, nevertheless, been the constant target of
| Israel attempting to drag the USA into a cataclysmic war.
|
| What world do _you_ live in?
| edgyquant wrote:
| Iran hasn't directly started any wars, but has been
| fighting proxy wars across the Middle East and Africa for
| over a generation. You are seriously misinformed here and
| should not be discussing this stuff until that changes.
| The entire spectrum of conflicts in the Middle East right
| now are all coordinated by Iran and its revolutionary
| guard.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Iran has started no wars in recent memory, killed no
| civilians_
|
| By that measure, America's never done any mischief in
| Latin America!
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They bombed Pakistan the other day.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >and can't really be argued.
|
| _Challenge accepted_.
|
| Iran is pretty darn hard to actually invade - unlike
| Iraq, Iran has tons of mountainous terrain and a huge
| army, and even the US hasn't tried it. So while it would
| be very unfortunate for Iran if they got into that war,
| the regime _might_ survive. The US could probably do a
| lot more, but if they did then Iran could go
| metaphorically-nuclear and block the strait of Hormuz,
| destroying global oil supply and supply of LNG to asia,
| causing mass blackouts there. So the US would be quite
| leery about doing so.
|
| Israel could nuke Iran, but then they'd be utterly fucked
| politically. Not just for breaking the nuclear taboo, but
| because Hezvollah et al would cream themselves and have
| basically infinite recruitment.
|
| In contrast, Israel has recently had some of its citizens
| killed by the Iran-backed Hamas, and are bordering both
| Lebanon and Syria. This didn't hurt Iran from political
| backlash, _not at all_ , Iran's been pretty open in their
| hating Israel. If _for any reason_ the US withdrew its
| military backing for Israel, Iran could and would support
| an extended proxy war between Israel and its neighbors.
| Not Gaza (Israel controls their water and fuel supply, so
| if they 're not concerned about pissing off the US and
| rest of the world then they can kill them all fairly
| easily) but Lebanon and Syria via Hezbollah and some
| 'renegotiation' over Golan heights.
|
| What's more, Iran could just invade Israel outright, with
| Syria's support. Iran has 9x the population size and
| their army is reasonably modern. Without US backing,
| Egypt's current dictator could decide to provide military
| support of their own. And if they win that war then
| Israelis will be _ethnically cleansed_. Which is arguably
| a worse threat than what Israel could do to Iran.
|
| There you go, it _can_ be argued! I wouldn 't normally
| argue for it, I'd say they're about equal personally.
| It's kind of weird to compare them; _neither_ is really
| in a good position to fight the other in the first place.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Good post, I basically agree - hence the current policy
| Israel and America have cooked up of isolation and
| embargo.
|
| Regarding ethnic cleansing, while you speculate, the
| Gazans suffer under it in reality.
|
| I'd give Iran the implicit moral highground because they
| are pretty peaceful and haven't attempted to ethnically
| cleanse anyone, unlike Israel in both aspects.
|
| Just on the basis of _what has actually happened_ ,
| Israel is an egregiously immoral state. Rich man, eye of
| a needle and all that.
|
| Now, as for whether or not they would... I think they
| probably would. But that's speculation, not reality.
| tjpnz wrote:
| >3. China is no discernible threat to Japan.
|
| China is known to make spurious territorial claims. What
| happens if they produce an ancient fishing map tomorrow
| claiming Okinawa as their own?
| mrangle wrote:
| Unless China plans on a war of mutual total destruction, it
| can't take Okinawa let alone stand against the rest of
| Japan.
| lebean wrote:
| A vassal state?
| gggmaster wrote:
| Obviously
| ThisIsMyAltAcct wrote:
| Using a definition of "vassal" that's so broad as to be
| meaningless, yes
| edgyquant wrote:
| How is it meaningless? Japan was conquered and has had
| its constitution written by the US while hosting a large
| number of its troops. The only difference between this
| and any other historical vassal state is the US paints an
| illusion of not being one and its economic system doesn't
| require tribute to profit greatly as it favors trade.
| ThisIsMyAltAcct wrote:
| It also is free to amend and revise its constitution, to
| terminate the US-Japan defense treaty (Article 10), to
| pursue its own foreign policy goals, etc. "Vassal state"
| is an old term with specific connotations that fits Japan
| if you sort of squint the right way but really doesn't.
| edgyquant wrote:
| If Japan ended its defense treaty and began pursing goals
| counter to US interests, you are mistaken if you think it
| would lead to a conflict.
| ThisIsMyAltAcct wrote:
| To military conflict? I doubt it. To political and
| economic conflict? Probably. The same thing would be true
| of France or Poland. That's generally what happens when
| an ally country stops being an ally country, but it
| doesn't imply that they're a vassal state.
| edgyquant wrote:
| France and Poland are also US vassals lmao. France can
| make a better case but that's because it admitted that
| all of these alliances subserve it to the US in the 60s
| and has fought hard to retain some semblance of
| independence.
| ThisIsMyAltAcct wrote:
| Are there any US allies you don't consider vassals? Is
| every NATO member a vassal?
| berserk1010 wrote:
| Here's an interesting and often used Chinese government
| propaganda word they use: vassal. It's meant to insult any
| U.S allies that work together with U.S against Chinese
| aggression, and to try to drive a wedge between the
| countries. Nevermind that it's so obvious it never works. And
| they never call Russia or North Korea a Chinese vassal
| officially - although some Chinese netizens do
| severino wrote:
| > It's meant to insult any U.S allies
|
| Lol, there's no such thing as "US allies". All US
| presidents agree, but only Trump acknowledged it.
| radiator wrote:
| Perhaps some ideology makes you ignore the otherwise obvious
| similarities between the peoples of Taiwan and Japan -
| including but not limited to intelligence, work culture and
| education - but to me, Taiwan and "some EU country" seem to be
| a world apart.
| ClarityJones wrote:
| I don't think they were talking about the people, but the
| geography. The Taiwan and Japan are both physically close to
| China. Taiwan is 125 miles away. Japan is 500+ miles away.
| Germany is 5,500 miles away.
| mrangle wrote:
| There are select EU nations that fit that bill. I'd be more
| suspect of the fact that the EU's political future (not
| existence, but future) is more uncertain than is communicated
| to the public. East-West political instability would be a
| concern in terms of ip control and espionage, at minimum. For
| more context, historically Europe is a powder keg.
| gottorf wrote:
| Not just work culture; in my opinion, Taiwan is culturally
| closer to a Chinese-speaking Japan than an extension of
| mainland China.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It's easier to hire in Japan when you already have Sony and the
| optics makers (Nikon, Canon etc) with past knowledge in fabbing
| than in many other countries.
|
| That said, I think TSMC had plans for factories basically
| anywhere they could, not laying they eggs in any single basket.
| The difference will probably be in process levels.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Place like France or the Netherlands are safer than Japan, but
| not by _that_ much, and Japan is far less likely to end up in a
| trade war with the US. Europe may have had a tough few years,
| but it's pretty much the one place on Earth that could be
| capable of going toe-to-toe with North America.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >I think EU is a safer bet compared to Japan
|
| EU's members in NATO have the same safety guarantee provided by
| the USA as Japan. The US and Japan have a direct alliance that
| is a treaty guaranteed by the US if Japan is attacked compared
| to Ukraine's Budapest Memorandum.
|
| EU is no safer than Japan. see the current Ukraine-Russia war.
|
| Japan and Taiwan have similar work cultures and are far closer
| to Taiwan compared to the US. A 45-minute plan ride for TSMC's
| higher-up to check on their fabs in Japan is far easier
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| >EU is no safer than Japan. see the current Ukraine-Russia
| war.
|
| Ok, IDK why I keep seeing this but I have yet to see any
| basis in objective reality for it.
|
| Two years ago? Sure. But now with Russia having expended a
| minimum of half of all of its military stores on a _proxy
| war_ with a previously insignificant former Soviet vassal,
| there is no rational reason to consider them to be a security
| threat in the region. Yes they still have enough nukes to
| level pretty much everything but if that happens, everywhere
| becomes insecure so it 's not a real consideration.
|
| The worst possible case for the EU (aside from general
| nuclear exchange, but again...) at this point is some sort of
| migrant tsunami (pun intended I guess) from a failing Russian
| state and subsequent loss of stability in neighboring regions
| to the south but I'd absolutely take that over being within
| rock throwing distance of an exponentially militarizing
| China, particularly given that the EU and China aren't even
| really adversaries in any meaningful way.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there is no rational reason to consider them to be a
| security threat in the region_
|
| Putin is a dictator. Actions irrational for Russia could be
| rational for him. Would NATO risk broad conflict if he
| puttered around in the Baltics? I think so. But do I know
| so? And wouldn't challenging NATO like that play rather
| well domestically?
| Longlius wrote:
| Japan is one of the most armed countries in the world and one
| of the most defensible. I highly doubt that Japan is less safe
| than most of the EU in practical terms.
| alexnewman wrote:
| So what's cool about japan is people stay in the job for a long
| time and they are affordable, yet the country is very high tech
| and educated. This seems like a stronger match than America. The
| TSMC chairman said they retain people for 10 years in taiwan
| supportengineer wrote:
| We talk a lot about software bloat. How good/fast do chips really
| need to be for defense purposes? Chips are so good now it seems
| you could be 2-3 generations back and still get the job done.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| These chips are probably aimed first and formost at civil
| production, in particular for car/plane/boats (for domestic and
| export needs) and consumer electronics, from rice cookers to
| door bells etc.
|
| For Japan it's a crucial bet, a lot more than other countries
| in America or the EU as it's the crux of the economy.
| sofixa wrote:
| > consumer electronics, from rice cookers to door bells
|
| I doubt rice cookers and toasters are using the latest chips
| for TSMC. E.g. the ESP32 microcontrollers are manufactured by
| TSMC on 40nm, and there are a bunch of different companies
| that have similarly sized/powerful microcontrollers being
| manufactured (e.g. STMicro).
| makeitdouble wrote:
| If I get your point, the question would why have TSMC make
| these low end cheaper chip in Japan when they abund on the
| market ?
|
| The whole effort of bringing TSMC factories to Japan was
| triggered by the shortage a few years ago, when I think a
| Toyota factories had to slow down as they couldn't get
| enough chips to meet the production goals.
|
| They'll probably rely on TSMC to make the deal work even if
| external competitors offer better prices or availability in
| the short term.
| obmelvin wrote:
| Isn't this about 6 and 7mm nodes? Aren't those still
| pretty good nodes with lower costs than the cutting edge
| (3nm and lower)?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It's planned to produce from 40nm down to 6~7nm. Now, the
| 6~7nm might end as an empty promise, if TSMC wants to
| keep more advantage at home.
| dragontamer wrote:
| It seems like RADAR can continuously be analyzed and improved
| with more and more compute power.
|
| When RADAR is the eyes and ears on the modern battlefield, you
| want as many computers on it as possible to find as many
| targets as possible and to differentiate them.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If one is serious about it, there is a clear distinction
| between verifiable and trusted computation. There's also a
| less clear distinction between cheap and expensive to verify
| ones.
|
| Just because most equipment must be trusted, it doesn't mean
| you can't use lots and lots of untrustable hardware.
| trashtester wrote:
| As drones (both airial, ground based and naval) take over for
| human soldiers, state-of-the-art electronics may increase in
| strategic importance rather than decrease.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Drones are becoming more important, sure, but will never take
| over for humans. Humans are immune to cyber-attacks in ways
| that drones can't be (humans are capable of major autonomy so
| maintaining connection is less important, for example), but
| all of that is overshadowed by perhaps the most important
| strategic feature of human soldiers:
|
| Human soldiers can be killed. If e.g. Russia bombed a US
| military base in <country>, then the US has an instant cassus
| belli (and is politically forced to respond drastically and
| be drawn into the war) and <country> _knows this_ , which
| makes the US military base a far more effective red line
| against Russia as a result. In other words, human solders act
| as a political tripwire that more effectively binds allies
| together.
| addicted wrote:
| This makes sense. The counter argument would be that war is a
| competitive endeavor. So if you do have chips that are 2-3
| generations behind what your opponent has access to they will
| try to design weaponry that takes advantage of this gap.
| someguydave wrote:
| Sure but nobody is going to build a brand new factory that
| implements an old process
| a321neo wrote:
| Disassembly of crashed Russian missiles in Ukraine show that
| they use multiple consumer-grade microcontrollers and DSPs.
| Western systems engineers would typically have opted for a
| single aerospace/defense-grade FPGA instead of having so many
| different chips and interconnects complicating the system.
|
| Using Russia's approach you can easily stay many semiconductor
| manufacturing generations back. Using the Western approach you
| will prefer staying up to date so you can continue using the
| latest the latest proprietary manufacturer-supported FPGA
| tooling.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Russia's approach has historically always been zerg rushing -
| they view both people and military tech as disposable, so it
| has to be extremely cheap, but it doesn't matter if the
| accuracy loses out.
|
| The US, NATO in general, and especially Israel, are the other
| end of the spectrum: they prefer expensive, but powerful and
| very accurate weapons (and in the case of vehicles,
| prioritize survivability). For Western countries, wars are
| unpopular so they want to keep the fatality rate low, and
| Israel doesn't have that many people in the first place so
| their Merkava tank designs focus survivability even more.
| a321neo wrote:
| The Merkava has seen some time losses but that was due to
| open back hatchets and IEDs big enough to flip the entire
| vehicle.
| gipp wrote:
| So, maybe someone here can explain this to me. I anyways hear
| about how the entire semiconductor industry is completely
| dependent on TSMC, and nothing can operate without them, thus
| their geopolitical importance.
|
| But then what are Intel, Arm, etc in this picture? I don't
| understand semiconductor manufacturing in enough detail -- I
| assume TSMC occupies a different part of the supply chain? But
| chip manufacturing seems like a pretty integrated process top to
| bottom; what's the division between them? In concrete terms, what
| is it that TSMC is doing that nobody else is?
| cromka wrote:
| ARM does not manufacture own chips, they just design and
| license them. Outside of Intel, pretty much everyone else uses
| TSMC to build their computing chips.
| hosteur wrote:
| Not even amd or TI?
| whstl wrote:
| AMD's main manufacturer is TSMC. They also use other
| companies AFAIK.
|
| Texas Instruments has its own factories in the USA but
| AFAIK they make other kinds of ICs than the popular ones
| that TSMC is known for, they do mostly analog and embedded
| (still important stuff).
|
| The sibling post to yours lists other factories. There are
| definitely other companies.
| kmlx wrote:
| > Outside of Intel, pretty much everyone else uses TSMC to
| build their computing chips.
|
| this isn't correct.
|
| UMC, SMIC and TI have more than 10 fabs each.
|
| Nanya 3 fabs.
|
| Micron > 10 fabs.
|
| Intel > 10 fabs.
|
| Tower Semiconductor 7 fabs.
|
| Rohm > 10 fabs.
|
| Fuji 4 fabs.
|
| Fujitsu 5 fabs.
|
| Kioxia 10 fabs.
|
| Renesas 9 fabs.
|
| and the list goes on and on.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Most of these are _very_ large node sizes though [1]. In
| ultra-small node sizes for processors, there is basically
| only Intel, Samsung, Globalfoundries (ex AMD) and TSMC.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fab
| ricat...
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| except that GF isn't leading edge any more. Their
| smallest node is (I think) 12nm which is about 8 years
| behind.
| bonton89 wrote:
| Even Intel builds their GPUs at TSMC.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > I anyways hear about how the entire semiconductor industry is
| completely dependent on TSMC
|
| I don't think it's as strong dependance as many commenters
| assume here. Samsung is 2 years behind TSMC and intel 3-4 years
| behind in terms of fab capability. While losing 2 years of
| progress is not great, it's definitely nothing like world can't
| function without TSMC.
|
| Obviously they need few years to ramp up but I assume it's not
| like Taiwan geopolitics situation would change in a day.
| electriclove wrote:
| They focused on the manufacturing part
| https://youtu.be/r_8XClnnvIk
| CitizenKane wrote:
| Currently TSMC has the only leading edge chip fabrications
| plants (fabs) on the planet and they're all located in Taiwan.
| They account for all new chips for all new Apple products, all
| new AMD products, most new Nvidia products, etc. Most companies
| design the the chips, but then outsource the manufacturing of
| them to TSMC as building a fab has astronomical upfront costs.
|
| TSMC has acquired a lead in this area through a number of
| different methods. One of the main things is that they focus
| deeply on manufacturing. Another is that they work 24 hours a
| day in R&D, running 3 shifts so they basically have the lights
| on all the time. And as mentioned above, the upfront costs are
| incredibly high with a fab costing on the order of 20+ billion
| dollars to construct.
|
| Intel is attempting to catch up, but it will likely be another
| 3 to 5 years before they are able to do so. Honestly just
| having R&D up and going all the time is probably a huge
| advantage for TSMC and probably a big reason behind their
| success. Regardless, suffice to say basically all cutting edge
| product shipments would cease in a matter of months if TSMC
| fabs were destroyed.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Multi-shift R&D is a weird proposition. Is it for best using
| machinery?
| biztos wrote:
| According to this, it has something to do with the movement
| of the wafers:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35667282
|
| It also has to do with competitive boasting: theirs goes to
| eleven.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'd translate "move wafers" as run test batches. What I
| understand from that is that he can run more tests on his
| machines.
|
| Honestly, I'm not sure anything of that is real. I can't
| believe other fabs don't run tests 24/7, and I can't
| believe they have people that rarely meet changing the
| same machines instead of only running tests without
| changing anything.
| ambrose2 wrote:
| I used to work in R&D for leading edge node development
| and we had a couple night shift technicians to unblock
| long running high priority tests. However, we could have
| iterated much faster if we had dozens of engineers
| running additional tests at night. Some tests require you
| to be there at the tool to change temp and so on. And
| there are ton of possible tests you can do. If you get a
| result back in the middle of the night and have engineers
| to review the results and configure a new test then and
| there, that's a much faster learning cycle time.
|
| Another advantage of TSMC is how they have enough fab
| space dedicated to R&D that they can run prototypes
| through quicker because they aren't competing with
| manufacturing to get processed.
| azinman2 wrote:
| So if it's so successful why doesn't Intel etc just copy
| this process?
| foota wrote:
| Cost and culture? I don't know that most 20 year intel
| employees in Beaverton are going to be willing to do
| night shifts.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Worse yet, Moore's law was basically an automatic
| monopoly for anybody that had a much more productive R&D
| than the others. But we are only noticing the gains now,
| that the law is gone for years already.
|
| Maybe the culture thing is _really_ pervasive. It wouldn
| 't be a first.
| pests wrote:
| Some things are hard.
| jmartrican wrote:
| > Currently TSMC has the only leading edge chip fabrications
| plants (fabs) on the planet and they're all located in
| Taiwan.
|
| What about Samsung? I thought they also made leading edge.
| CitizenKane wrote:
| They're close, but I believe they're not doing any 3nm
| manufacturing at the moment but I could be wrong about
| that.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Intel is attempting to catch up, but it will likely be
| another 3 to 5 years before they are able to do so
|
| According to them they will do it in next 12 months.
| greggsy wrote:
| Sounds like hopeful words for investors
| tester756 wrote:
| What makes you think so? I have their stocks and been
| following their roadmaps and it seems to not be that out
| of touch with reality
| toephu2 wrote:
| Actually TSMC has 2 fabs in Mainland China (a 12" fab and an
| 8" fab), and one in the USA (8" fab) [1].
|
| [1] https://www.tsmc.com/english/aboutTSMC/TSMC_Fabs
| koromak wrote:
| What happens if a war with Taiwan does break out? Who's
| poised to pick up the slack?
| tommoor wrote:
| Literally no-one - the majority of high-tech consumer
| electronics would stop being produced as soon as existing
| chips run out.
| greggsy wrote:
| That's not true - with the exception of the leading edge
| nodes, there are other fabs.
|
| The question is how easily could they migrate and
| prioritise the workload?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| There's very few of these other fabs outside China. They
| exist, but aren't able to deliver enough at a global
| scale. That's what we learned the hard way during the
| chip shortage a few years ago, where car production for
| jbstance basically came to a crawl.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| If that happens, you won't care. You'll be concerned with
| your personal safety.
| tedivm wrote:
| This is part of the reason why you're hearing posts about
| TSMC expanding out of Taiwan. As it stands today it would
| be a fairly large economic hit to have advanced processors
| stop production. Building out redundancy seems to be a top
| priority.
|
| It's also worth noting that in the event of a war the US is
| very, very likely to bomb the shit out of the TSMC plants.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/us-would-destroy-taiwan-
| semi...
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/14/us_china_tsmc_taiwan
| /
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Perhaps Korea or Japan, but in practice nobody, and that's
| partly by design.
|
| Taiwan being the core producer of the super high end chips
| is guaranteing them that if a war ever happens, they won't
| be left as sacrifice to the opponent while the rest of the
| world goes business as usual.
|
| They critically need to be a strategic and non replaceable
| producer.
| cyrillite wrote:
| Where can someone dig into the data on this?
| sofixa wrote:
| > I anyways hear about how the entire semiconductor industry is
| completely dependent on TSMC, and nothing can operate without
| them, thus their geopolitical importance.
|
| This is quite hyperbolic. While losing TSMC will have a massive
| global impact, there are alternatives in many different market
| segments (e.g. Intel for CPUs and GPUs for computing, be it
| personal or datacenter), STMicro/NXP/Infineon/Bosch for
| industrial applications, etc. They may not be as advanced, or
| as good, or as cheap, or in enough quantities, but it's flat
| out false to say that TSMC is the entire semiconductor
| industry. Just a major portion of the bleeding edge.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Intel before Patrick P. Gelsinger only made chips for Intel.
|
| ARM doesn't make chip
|
| on the low-end and mid-tier chip, you have plenty of fabs like
| Global Foundries, UMC...etc.
|
| on the high end, you have Intel, TSMC, and Samsung
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Intel used to have the fab lead over everyone else, generally
| being 1-2 generations ahead. That persisted for at least a
| decade. Then they had a huge whiff. Their 10nm node was due in
| 2016 and they didn't start volume production until 2019. That
| gave TSMC a huge opportunity to catch up and pass them which is
| exactly what they did... TSMC went volume on 10nm in 2017.
|
| Samsung is behind a generation (or thereabouts). Not sure why
| exactly.
|
| AMD spun off their fab as GlobalFoundaries. The separate
| company bowed out of the bleeding-edge fab business. Their 14nm
| node was licensed from Samsung and they completely cancelled
| their 7nm node.
|
| As bleeding-edge fabs kept getting more and more expensive lots
| of companies decided to go fabless. They were able to do that
| because unlike everyone else TSMC doesn't make chips for itself
| so it doesn't represent a competitive threat. This is the real
| key to TSMC's success.
|
| Other companies like GlobalFoundaries and ON Semi are filling
| volume with older process nodes like 14nm. There's a large
| number of chips needed by millions of manufacturers large and
| small. Only a small proportion of those need the power/perf you
| get from the latest and greatest. Manufacturing on an older
| node is cheaper thanks to lower capex and much much better
| yields.
|
| Eventually I think we'll see litho equipment make its way into
| the niche market similar to 3d printers. We've seen some people
| hacking together stuff to make their own chips in a garage...
| they're tiny 5-2000 transistor affairs but it would be quite
| interesting to be able to churn out a custom chip with a
| million transistors on it.
| greggsy wrote:
| A cottage industry does seem to be within the realms of
| possibility, and 3D printing is an apt comparison. However,
| it's likely to be prone to the same challenges - input
| materials (filament and wafers) will be subject to variable
| quality and environmental factors (moisture, heat, dust), and
| the machines themselves will take some time to mature (how
| many iterations of incompatible 3D printer 'standards' have
| cropped up in the two decades since DIY printing emerged in
| the scene?).
|
| The nirvana of a household printing capability never really
| materialised.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Please explain this to me, isn't the lithography equipment
| from ASML that does all the hard work of imprinting the
| wafers? If Samsung and Intel buys the same machines why can't
| they make the chips with the same transistor density?
| pests wrote:
| Michelangelo had the same chisel and tools as every other
| artist of his time.
|
| Why didn't they just make art with the same quality?
|
| It's not just what tools you have, but how you use them.
|
| You don't just go plug in one of these machines and it
| starts pumping out working chips.
|
| Increasing density means better controls and processes,
| better knowledge of running and calibrating the machines.
|
| Tons of processes before and after the ASML machines.
| throwawayai2 wrote:
| Good answers here, but look at the book "Chip Wars" if you want
| to learn a lot more.
| Nokinside wrote:
| 6nm and 7nm technology nodes and 100k WSPM capacity. Other
| investors are Sony, Toyota, and Denso, they will also be main
| customers.
|
| Taiwan already has a fab in japan 40 nm, 28 nm, 22 nm, 16 nm, and
| 12 nm process technologies working with 55k WSPM capacity.
| Giorgi wrote:
| Nice choice, no way they will allow Chinese communists to get
| their hands on high tech.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Also from last year:
|
| "TSMC to build US$11 billion chip manufacturing plant in Germany"
| https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3230440/tsmc-build-u...
| philip1209 wrote:
| Perhaps In-Q-Tel will mysteriously get $20b in new AUM.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Japan not gonna go to war for you when China invades, bros
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Japan still not gonna go to war for you when China invades, bros
| haolez wrote:
| Is it feasible to a third world country to build a foundry like
| this? I've been curious about this for a long time. There are
| very few high end foundries in the world. It seems like a major
| supply chain risk.
| Andaith wrote:
| Question I've had for a while now: Why doesn't the UK have any
| serious chipmaking facilities?
|
| They'd be the perfect location wouldn't they? Abundant cheap
| water, absence of earthquakes, the usual business friendly
| environment...?
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